Misc. Menu

ScummVM takes you on an adventure in the world of Zork, with support for two
new games! In Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands, your task is to embark on a
journey to solve the mystery of a spirit called Nemesis, and of the four
alchemists it killed. On your second journey to Zork, in Zork: Grand
Inquisitor, you must find three legendary objects that will restore all magic
to the realm and bring about the fall of Grand Inquisitor Yannick, whose goal
is to "shun magic, shun the appearance of magic, shun everything, and then shun
shunning".

We recently added support for a new game, Sfinx, in ScummVM, and we can now proudly announce that it is ready to be tested. Thanks to the original developers, this game is now freeware and can be downloaded on our web site. And in addition to the original Polish version we are also proposing an English version! This version is not final, so we are looking for people who speak English and/or Polish and who are not afraid of spotting spelling and grammar mistakes in the texts of the game (English only), while also looking for different bugs, glitches and other evil things.

This year is the 20th anniversary of the release of the classic video game Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb. The Wyrmkeep Entertainment Co. has announced that it is developing a sequel entitled Inherit the Earth: Sand and Shadows.

This all-ages adventure game is set in a world of humanoid, anthropomorphic animal characters. The story follows Rif the Fox as he tries to confirm the rumors that an important relic of the legendary humans has survived and who is responsible for the relic's recovery. Unfortunately, there are sinister forces involved in the rumors — ones that endanger Rif, his friends, and his society.

"Inherit the Earth: Sand and Shadows will be enchanting and thrilling game for all to enjoy, with subtleties and hidden depths that can be appreciated by older players," said company president, Joe Pearce. "With the help of the backers to the funding drive, we expect to release a great game mid-2015."

A video demo has been released on the game's website at http://InheritTheEarth2.com. The video provides a preview of the art, animation and play experience that will appear in the product.

In conjunction with this announcement, the company has launched a funding drive on Kickstarter to help in completing development of the game. Information about this drive can be found at http://InheritTheEarth2.com/kickstarter.

With this release we have added support for 5 completely new games. These are:

The Neverhood

Mortville Manor

Voyeur

Return to Ringworld

Chivalry is Not Dead

Also, we have updated the MT-32 emulator, added an OpenGL backend, improved many aspects of the GUI,
enhanced the AGOS engine, made Urban Runner's videos
less CPU-demanding, fixed tons of bugs in dozens of SCI games, improved
sound in Loom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and
improved platform portability for the Tony and Tinsel engines.

But this is not all. We have added experimental support for the OUYA console
(we couldn't add GCW-Zero support simply because sev still awaits his
console from Kickstarter), made major improvements to the PS2 port and merged
the Bada with Tizen ports.

The forthcoming 1.7.0 release of ScummVM is almost here! This time around, we have a total of five newly supported games:

Chivalry Is Not Dead

Mortville Manor

Return to Ringworld

The Neverhood

Voyeur

But before we can release the latest and greatest version of ScummVM, we need help testing out all these new games. Besides the aforementioned new games for this release, the DOS floppy versions of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Loom, require testing running with our AdLib emulator. You can always check out which games still need testing on our wiki. There are also a few other old classics on that list that could use another run through.

A daily build is all that is required to get started. If you happen to find any bugs, please report them on the bug tracker. After completing one of the games, please let us know on the forums so we can post the results up on the wiki page. Be sure to follow our guidelines for release testing, which can be found on the wiki as well.

And while you play through these newly supported games, please submit some screenshots!

Or, the "Better late than never" announcement. It was pointed out to me today that although
we merged Voyeur into the master branch some months ago, we never actually called for an
official testing period. So this announcement seeks to remedy that.

Take on the role of a private investigator. A powerful CEO with aspirations for the
presidency has invited his family to his home for the weekend. There are suspicions of
corruption, and you've been hired to find out his secrets, and determine just what he's
hiding.

After more than two years since the original freeware release, the ScummVM Team is
announcing an update for the Dreamweb packages.

Thanks to the work of Simon Sawatzki we have the game manuals as well as the Diary of a (Mad?) Man
available in text and HTML format for the majority of our releases, so you can use your preferred
text-to-speech program to read them as your bedtime story.

All releases now include these documents and are marked as version 1.1. Of course, the previously available
high resolution scans will stay on the download page as well.

Additionally we have taken the opportunity to release the Italian version of the game.

Happy April Fools' Day! Unfortunately, we haven't really got a new developer... though pull requests are welcome!

We do not normally announce new developers here, but we have an unusual and talented developer recently join the team, Edward Snowden.

When we first got the e-mail from a dot-ru address which we will not be disclosing, we were skeptical.

However upon verifying his PGP key, we are convinced that this is not some kind of April Fools joke and are happy to welcome a talented software developer with enthusiasm to the team.

He is apparently a big fan of point and click adventures, especially Beneath a Steel Sky,, Dreamweb, Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth, and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. His collection allowed him to pass a long stopover at an airport last year and he decided then, once he had sorted some personal issues to get around to contributing some code to ScummVM.

As an avid fan of Larry Niven, he will be initially working on the TSaGE support for Return to Ringworld along with Strangerke, and will be using the nickname "crazyeddie"

Please can we ask the other developers and users not to bother him about any issues outside of ScummVM and not to send any irrelevant e-mails to his ScummVM address at "crazyeddie@scummvm.org" Thanks!

Happy April Fools' Day! Much thanks to LordHoto for the mock achievement dialog code and for the Hand of Fate and Zak McKracken quotes. Thanks to ST, DrMcCoy, and Strangerke for all their input.

Due to high demand, ScummVM is extremely proud and thrilled to announce the introduction of achievements to various games. Games really have no replay value without achievements, so we hope that our loyal users will enjoy finally being able to play them again the way they've always meant to be played. They're finally ready for the 21st century!

The ScummVM team managed to put together a huge list of achievements that we wanted to see in various games, including some not-yet-supported ones. From there, we just plugged in our simple dialog and achievement tracking code, and were able to add it to all engines easily. Soon integration with the forums will be complete and you will be able to share all your achievements there.

LordHoto was really excited to work on this feature saying, "This is the coolest feature I've added to The Legend of Kyrandia." "First Steam's achievements came to Linux and now this? Linux gamers should be thrilled for all the achievements they can now earn!" added DrMcCoy.

We are very excited to announce that we are going to be doing things a little differently this year. In addition to our own participation in Google Summer of Code, ScummVM will also be acting as an umbrella organization for our sister project, ResidualVM.

Both projects will be working hand in hand with students and mentors over the coming months. The first obvious sign of this collaboration can be found in our merged GSoC ideas page.

So if you're interested in being a GSoC student this year, please take a look at the ideas page and come and talk to us. We love to welcome potential students on IRC and the ScummVM and ResidualVM mailing lists are also splendid places to start! We have a lot of exciting things to suit a range of skillsets and we also warmly welcome task proposals other than those on the list if you feel so inspired!

For the seventh year in a row, we have been accepted as a Google Summer of Code project.

Perhaps it is because both our project and the program have unusual letter casing? The world may never know, but we are thrilled to be accepted again and welcome fellow students to join our team and work on awesome 2D point-and-click adventures. If you are an eligible student for the GSoC and want to contribute to your favorite open-source project, take a look at
our project ideas, but you always can offer your own.

You are Jerome Lange, a Bogart clone private eye who's received an invitation from an old friend
to join her at Mortville Manor to help with a desperate situation. With a name like Mortville you
might suppose something is seriously wrong and, yes, you're right. Your old friend Julia has already
departed to Deadsville.

So... Who did dunnit?

Based on the sources provided by DotEmu and by Lankhor founders and developers,
the ScummVM Team is pleased to announce support for France's 1987 Game of the Year:
Mortville Manor.
Only the DOS versions are supported, and ScummVM is bringing to you the first DOS English translation.
So, grab your disk and copy the files, then start playing using the latest daily build
of ScummVM and help us testing it.

Lord Horrible has sent you on a quest to kill the Queen of Everything,
playing the role of the horribly disfigured Phlegmwad you will have the
chance to choose how to (not?) fullfill this quest of epic proportions.

With great help from game developer Deirdra Kiai and Wintermute developer Jan Nedoma
the ScummVM Team is pleased to announce support for our first Wintermute game:
Chivalry is Not Dead.
So, download a copy of the game and start playing
in the latest daily build
of ScummVM and help us with testing this open-ended game.

"They said it would it would never be done. They were wrong." After a slight hiatus
at the start of the year, work has finally finished on our next TsAGE game, Return to
Ringworld. The only remaining work still in progress is a card game available on the
in-game consoles, and is completely unrelated to the main story.

This is a direct sequel to the original Ringworld game.. after saving the puppeteer
race from extermination and uncovering some powerful ancient technology on the first
game, Quinn, Seeker of Vengeance and Miranda Rees find themselves searched for as
fugitives by all three major species, so they plan to go to Ringworld to hide. But it
turns that their ship has suffered problems. And fixing them and getting to Ringworld
will only be the start of their problems..

The Wintermute engine has been in the works in ScummVM for a little
over a year now, and it has gotten more and more mature, to the point
that we feel it is getting close to being ready for release.

Since the amount of games involved is rather huge, we'd love to get
some help with a round of testing before we check off on the engine being
ready for our next release. Thus, we have semi-arbitrarily selected a set
of Wintermute-games that would benefit from some testing, and hope that
some of our wonderful users are willing to take them for a spin.

After 11 long months we are thrilled to announce the release of ScummVM
1.6.0.

It's not very often (if ever) that we add 4 new engines in a single release,
but yes, these have been busy months for the team indeed.

Let's just list the new games 1.6.0 contains for you:

3 Skulls of the Toltecs

Eye of the Beholder

Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon

Hopkins FBI

Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths

The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime

Other significant features include support for the Macintosh version of
Discworld 1 and the music in the Macintosh versions of LucasArts
adventures, an update to the latest Roland MT-32 emulation code, a new cool
grid chooser for your savegames, an extended FluidSynth configuration dialog,
and major bugfixes to bike fights in Full Throttle. We have also added
Belarusian, Finnish and Galician translations to our GUI.

Greetings, fellow adventure gamers! We have finally come to the point when ScummVM 1.6.0 testing starts.

This release adds support for a number of new games that need to be tested:

3 Skulls of the Toltecs

Eye of the Beholder

Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon

Hopkins FBI

Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths

The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime

In addition, if you have Macintosh version of Discworld, please give it a try as well.

A daily build should be used for testing these,
and if something goes unexpectedly wrong, please report it to our
bug tracker.
The completed games need to be reported on our
forums and we will update our release
testing page. For a usable test report, we need you to provide the version, language, and platform
of the game you're testing. And, of course, please stick to the
testing guidelines.

This release also has another interesting aspect. Depending on how intensively games are tested,
we will add support for one more game: Hopkins FBI. For support to happen, we need test
results on several platforms using several variants of the game, which includes the BeOS, OS/2,
Linux and Windows versions.

In conclusion, if you want Hopkins FBI in ScummVM 1.6.0, grab your originals and contribute
to this new testing period! We are also in need of screenshots too! Please submit them to
our patch tracker.

James Woodcock has today released his enhanced music for classic point & click adventure game Touché: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer, as part of his 'ScummVM Music Enhancement Project'.

By adding the external digital music files provided for free by James and with our ScummVM software, users can enjoy the updated soundtrack within the actual title as it is played.

Using modern MIDI hardware, James edits the original MIDI information and records them as external digital music files. Developers of ScummVM then add code so the newly created files will work within the titles.

"ScummVM has always inspired my involvement and although I am not a programmer, I hope my ScummVM Music Enhancement Project adds a little extra enjoyment to users of this fine point and click adventure software." says James Woodcock, creator of the enhanced soundtrack.

James has previously released other enhanced soundtracks for titles including:

We're hoping to find another group of students who want to help out the ScummVM project and get paid for 12 weeks of coding work over the summer.

Maybe you'd like to help us improve support for games, or enhance our user interface? Perhaps you'd like to revamp our OpenGL support and accelerate the rendering of some engines? Or do you have even bigger ideas, like starting support for yet more games?

If any of this seems like a good way to spend your summer, take a look at our ideas list, or drop into our IRC channel (#scummvm on irc.freenode.net) and have a chat with us!

Beware: the application period is from April 22 to May 3, so be sure to talk to us in time! We know from previous years that it's really helpful to apply early, and to get involved with the ScummVM community so we can help to revise your application.

It's the year 2318; you're part of an agency created to protect the integrity of the timeline after time travel has been invented. After it is detected that someone has changed the past, it's up to you to repair the time stream!

The ScummVM Team is proud to announce support for the Macintosh version of The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime. So go grab the latest daily build of ScummVM and play through the game to assist us in testing!

After saving an old peddler from a band of bandits, Fenimore Fillmore
finds out about three skulls that will unlock the lost treasure of the
Toltecs! It's up to him to find the golden skulls and the treasure,
before the bandits do!

The ScummVM Team is pleased to announce support for
3 Skulls of the Toltecs.
So grab your copies of the DOS versions of the game and start playing
in the latest daily build
of ScummVM and help us with the testing, while enjoying this great
cartoon western adventure game!

Grim Fandango was created on the peak of LucasArts games popularity. The ever-inspirational Tim Schafer in a fury of artistry packed together the best atmosphere he could create and the game was born.
For a while there was great and steady efforts on creating an engine which would run this masterpiece on the modern hardware.
The project is called ResidualVM.

After more than 9 years of hard work, our "sister" project, ResidualVM has reached a stable state and
is now announcing their first stable release.

We survived the apocalypse! Let's celebrate that: grab your original of Grim Fandango and visit their site!

The city of Waterdeep is in dire need of heroes to defend it from the
evil below the city. Assemble a group of four heroes, heed the call
of the Lords of Waterdeep and start your quest in the sewers below the
city!

But beware, for this is not your only quest. Archmage Khelben needs you
to investigate strange happenings near the Temple of Darkmoon. People
around it are disappearing and human remains are found in shallow
graves.

The ScummVM team, in close collaboration with Nayma soft (the legal rights owner) and DotEmu, is happy to announce support for Tony Tough in our development branch. The title is available for purchase from DotEmu.

However, the game was tested only on Windows and Linux, so we would like to announce our usual testing period. Please grab the game from your attic or purchase it from DotEmu, test it with a daily build and submit your bug reports to our bug tracker.

We would also like to take this opportunity to announce the affiliation program with DotEmu: By buying games through this link or by using the banner on the right side of the page, you will be supporting ScummVM.

After the previous announcement, several of you asked for the Italian version of Flight of the Amazon Queen.
We would like to thank Hkz for providing the original CD and John Passfield and Steve Stamatiadis for accepting our request to make this version freeware.
The ScummVM project team is therefore proud to bring you the Italian version of the game, using English speech with Italian subtitles.

Several years ago, we brought you the English, the German and the Hebrew versions of "Flight of the Amazon Queen".
Today, thanks to John Passfield and Steve Stamatiadis over at Krome Studios in Australia and their previous discussions with
James 'Ender' Brown, the ScummVM project team is proud to bring you the French talkie version of the game.

Jakimusha worked on a testing framework, Singron on improving our scalers by creating a plugin system, Somaen on the integration of the Wintermute engine in ScummVM, and Upthorn worked on improving our code for saving games.

The Wintermute engine has already been merged, and pull requests for the new testing framework and the new scaler plugin systems are currently being polished. While Upthorn's project didn't last the summer, we have a pull request which adds much-improved support for saving games to the composer engine.

The next and final step for this year of GSoC is the mentor summit, where ScummVM will be represented again by sev and Strangerke.

We'd like to thank once again Google for their organization, their support and for accepting us this year again. ScummVM made a great step forward thanks to them, once again!

We'd also like to warmly thank Jakimushka, Singron, Somaen and Upthorn for working this summer with us, with a special mention for Somaen who decided to keep working for ScummVM on Wintermute. We hope that some of the others might do so too!

The 7th Guest is James' 5th enhanced soundtrack released so far with another on the horizon.
The project enables users of ScummVM who own the original game the ability to experience
game MIDI music through high quality modern equipment without any of the cost, which has
been in this case edited and recorded on James' Tyros4 keyboard, currently Yamaha's
flagship model.

"The 7th Guest revolutionised the way in which we experience video games and the
soundtrack originally created by The Fat Man added to the overall atmosphere and
splendour" commented James Woodcock, creator of the ScummVM Music Enhancement
Project. James continued "With the wonderful soundtrack originally in MIDI format,
it was an obvious title to target for enhancement and I appreciated that Trilobyte Games
gave their blessing".

James has already released enhanced soundtracks for Simon the Sorcerer, Discworld, Inherit
the Earth and more recently Beneath A Steel Sky.

Little Red Riding Hood looking over at her grandmother's latest install of ScummVM, noting the update to version 1.5.0 and asked "My what a lot of games you now support". "All the better to entertain you with my dear!" responded the curiously grinning relative.

We all love to feast on the most sumptuous of gaming titles and our latest release will fulfil your craving for even more classic point and click adventures.

Version 1.5.0 adds support for Once Upon A Time: Little Red Riding Hood and the following titles:

We are proud to announce that yet another Coktel Vision game is supported now. Once Upon A Time: Little Red Riding Hood is an interactive story following the well-known fairy tale and lets you play as either the titular Little Red Riding Hood or as the wolf.

Euh... No, not this nightmare: you're Ryan, a bartender who can't sleep peacefully for months
because of weird dreams and nightmares. During one of those, a monk suggests you become the
deliverer who would keep the Dreamweb safe by killing its enemies.

The ScummVM Team is proud to announce that
Dreamweb is now
playable in ScummVM using the latest
daily builds, and
ready for testing.

Almost six weeks ago, we announced you that ScummVM has been accepted by Google for its Google Summer of Code 2012. Since then, we received many good applications and we asked a lot of efforts to the students to clarify and enhance theirs. We'd like to thank them all for all these efforts!

Yesterday, Google announced the list of accepted students and tasks per project and it's with great joy that we announce you that this year, 4 students will be working on ScummVM tasks:

Jakimushka will work on a new testing framework based on an event recorder/player

Singron will turn scalers into plugins and will add some new ones

Somaen will integrate the Wintermute Lite engine and will add some currently missing functionalities

Upthorn will work on a new save anywhere feature, per engine, particularly useful for mobile devices

We'd like to welcome them warmly and to wish them the best! And of course, last but not least, we'd like to thank Google for giving us the possibility, once more, to work with talented students during summer time.

Happy April Fools' Day! Thanks to ST for providing a screenshot of one of his Groovie C# tools.

No, we're not moving to a new website. I'm proud to announce the new ScummVM rewrite in C# for Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360 ports. This does not include any of the previous "ScummVM-XNA" code and is all new code based on our current working tree.

The Windows Phone 7 port has been the main target of our work as I'm more familiar with the touchscreen controls. It shouldn't be much more work for the Xbox 360 port since I'm going through the XNA Game Studio. Since going through each engine is very tedious work, I've only worked on the engine I'm most familiar with: Groovie. And, I think the results speak for themselves.

I'll have the source code up on GitHub soon, but here's a brief snippet of some working converted C# code.

Happy April Fools' Day! Thanks to DrMcCoy, LordHoto, and Strangerke for their help.

Cedric is one of the most famous characters in Sierra history. However, he has divided the fanbase into those who find him slightly irksome and those that adore him. We have therefore come up with a modification for ScummVM that optionally removes Cedric from King's Quest V.

In addition to being able to remove Cedric from King's Quest V, we have also worked on a mode for all other ScummVM games to insert Cedric into them. Cedric integrates directly into those games and can interact with the game as well as the player. A set of screenshots of this mode (and of King's Quest V) can be found at the end of this news post.

Some of the other developers have also chimed in with their opinion on the subject. ScummVM PR officer Strangerke said, "ScummVM has always been about improving the quality of these games and now we finally have the opportunity to bring one of Sierra's most beloved characters to all the other games we support." "It really adds to these Coktel Vision games," stated ScummVM Gob developer DrMcCoy, "they're actually playable now." "I can't imagine playing these games any other way now; there's no going back," added clone2727.

Freelance Journalist James Woodcock recently
released a podcast, where he interviews three key developers from ScummVM including
Eugene Sandulenko (_sev), Arnaud Boutonné (Strangerke)
and Johannes Schickel (LordHoto).

The one hour long audio show discusses the origins of ScummVM, the challenges involved and
the exciting future ahead. The podcast also includes several MIDI tracks from classic point
and click adventure games, reminding us of the fantastic legacy of this genre.

We are very proud to announce that ScummVM has been accepted for another year as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code. So now it's your turn to show your motivation and your love of 2D adventure games: if you're an eligible student for the Google Summer of Code and want to contribute to your favorite open-source project, take a look at our idea page, or propose your own!

We are waiting for your questions and suggestions on our irc channel: #scummvm on irc.freenode.net

No, not that force, it's Blue Force. Jake Ryan has just graduated from the
Policy Academy, and it's up to you to guide his actions as he starts his police
career. He'll quickly become involved in solving a series of crimes which,
unbeknownst to him, are inextricably entwined with the murder of his parents
when he was a child.

Take a little break and compose yourself. After tireless weeks of work,
the ScummVM team is proud to announce support for two children's adventure games —
Gregory and the Hot Air Balloon and Darby the Dragon — And on top of that,
you can also play some interactive books from the Magic Tales series. So, if you can find
your childhood spirit, dig out your copies and enjoy those adorable games.

To play these, you'll need a daily build
of ScummVM. Any lurking bugs you find should be reported using our
bug tracker, and
along the way, please consider making few screenshots, following our
guidelines.

We are also looking for additional information on localised versions and Magic Tales books.
If you have one which is not recognized by the latest ScummVM daily build, please follow the guidelines
here and report this
to the team or as a bug.

Chief finally found a husband for his "beautiful" daughter, but before the end of the ceremony, Leon escaped. So now... where is Leon?

The ScummVM Team is proud to announce that Soltys is playable for the first time in English and Polish using ScummVM! Special thanks to L.K. Avalon and Mr Wiśniewski for providing the sources and to nutron for spending so much time on the translation!

If you would like to contribute further, you could invest some of your free time in translating Soltys and Dragon History, which should be easy to translate to most European-based languages. If you are interested, please contact translation AT scummvm DOT org.

"I have tried very hard to remain faithful to the originals in respect to the
excellent composers creations..." says James Woodcock, creator of the ScummVM
Music Enhancement Project. He continues "...There has been a lot of support and
interest from Beneath A Steel Sky fans, who have been monitoring its progress
very carefully and it is with great pleasure I can finally play Beneath A Steel
Sky using new versions of the original soundtrack with many thanks to the
developers of ScummVM for all their hard work in making this feature possible".

James uses the Yamaha Tyros4 keyboard hooked up to his computer via USB and
after going through various tweaking, recording and editing, a finalised music
track is born.

You can download the enhanced soundtrack from James'
Beneath A Steel Sky page,
where instructions are also included. You can follow and show your support
for James on both Twitter and
Facebook.

It has been over 10 years. We are here thanks to the work of 131 developers. 49,124 commits
were made just to the ScummVM tree and those turned into a massive 1,085,714 lines of code
(excluding comments) and of course over 7.6 million downloads from the main site alone.
I would say those were a great ten years.

The outcome is ScummVM 1.4.0 which we are releasing today, 11/11/11 11:11:11.11.

More games are supported: Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos(based
on the same engine as Kyrandia), the kids' game Blue's Birthday Adventure,
and the science fiction game Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch. On top of that, practically all
supported Sierra SCI games now have their Amiga versions working. Our musically inclined
users will notice PC speaker support in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge and
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, CMS support in Loom, The Secret of
Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, fixed MIDI in the DOS versions
of the Elvira series, and even sound in Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood!

Tiqpit worked on improving the AGI Engine. Sadly, he decided to quit before the end of his tasks, but his code was of such good quality that it is now merged into master, so ScummVM benefits from his work.

Enginmanap worked on objectifying the CruisE engine. He did a great job, and his work is currently being polished before a final merge into master.

We were also represented at the mentor summit by sev and Strangerke.

We are really grateful to Google for all of their support, and are already working on GSoC 2012 tasks.

Fasten your seatbelts because another ScummVM release is just around the corner!

However, we need your help first in testing out a few games before we can release. In addition to the two new games for this release, Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos and Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch, we have a few other games that need testing. Please take a look at our wiki page to see which games need a playthrough.

And Strangerke would like to remind you to grab a couple of screenshots of Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos and Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch for us and submit them according to our guidelines.

No, it's not Tolkien's Ring, it's the Ringworld. Join Quinn, Miranda, and Seeker-of-Vengeance as they seek to unravel the mysteries of the Ringworld and find a way to stop the insane Kzinti Patriarch.

The ScummVM Team is pleased to announce support for Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch.
So grab your copy of the DOS Floppy or CD (original CD release/First Wave re-release), start playing in the latest daily build of ScummVM, and help us with the testing while enjoying this classic science fiction adventure.

We are proud to announce a maintenance release of the ScummVM 1.3.x series.
This release has a number of fixes, mainly related to audio. Also, several games
had slipped past testing for 1.3.0 and turned out to be no longer completable.
They have now been fixed, so if you want to play Discworld,
Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb, I Have No Mouth, and I Must
Scream, or play FM-TOWNS SCUMM games on mobile devices or consoles,
we highly recommend that you upgrade.

These are amongst the last words of Timothy, one of your friends; But when the Dark Army is on the march, there is no time for mourning the dead.
Time is essential in the race against the evil sorceress Scotia, so you had better continue your journey to save the realm of Gladstone.

The ScummVM Team is pleased to announce support for Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos.
So grab your copy of the DOS Floppy, DOS CD or even the PC-98 version and start playing Lands of Lore in the latest daily build of ScummVM and help us with the testing, while enjoying this great game.
A quick side note: Unlike other ScummVM supported adventure games, Lands of Lore is an RPG (Role Playing Game). We are supporting it as it uses the same engine (KYRA) as The Legend of Kyrandia series. Please do not ask us to support other RPGs!

It has been longer than usual since the last release. Nevertheless the team is happy to announce the release of ScummVM 1.3.0.

The release is truly feature-rich: in particular we are introducing support for a new platform, WebOS, and adding a set of new games:
Urban Runner, Playtoons, Toonstruck, Hugo series, Living Books, Backyard Baseball.
We have also continued to work hard on the SCI engine, so Amiga and some Macintosh versions of the games are supported now too.
Many of our ports received improvements, and a number of bugs have been fixed in practically every engine. Thus your gameplay should
be smoother and more enjoyable.

The ScummVM team is announcing another round of release testing in preparation for our next release: 1.3.0!

Since our last release, we've been very busy working on adding support for more of your favorite games. Backyard Baseball. Backyard Baseball 2001, Hugo's House of Horrors, Hugo 2: Whodunit?, Hugo 3: Jungle of Doom, Playtoons: Bambou le Sauveur de la Jungle, Toonstruck, and Urban Runner are all ready for our loyal fans to play through to their hearts' content. Several Living Books games are also supported now: Aesop's Fables: The Tortoise and the Hare, Arthur's Birthday (v1), Arthur's Teacher Trouble, Dr. Seuss's ABC, Green Eggs and Ham, Harry and the Haunted House, Just Grandma and Me (v1), Little Monster at School, Ruff's Bone, Sheila Rae, the Brave, Stellaluna, The Berenstain Bears Get in a Fight, The Berenstain Bears in the Dark, The New Kid on the Block. You can see more info on the bugs we fixed and the features we added over here.

Like with our last release testing, not all games will be tested; only games that have had significant changes to their codebase since the last release are up for testing. As usual, the list of games to be tested is on the wiki.

Those games aren't going to test themselves! Download a daily build and report any bugs you find to the bug tracker. If you complete a game, please let us know on the forums so we can throw the results up on the wiki page. Be sure to provide the version, language, and platform of your game when reporting a completion. Any other questions? Go check out the release testing guidelines.

Continuing our incredible pace of one announcement per month, we're proud to be able to ask you to grab your copies of Hugo's trilogy (DOS or Windows version) and try them out in ScummVM using the latest daily build.

The games supported (Hugo's House of Horror, Hugo 2: Whodunit? and Hugo 3: Jungle of Doom) are still available for sale on the author's site. So buy them if you don't own them, copy the required data files and give them a try!

We are very excited to announce support for ScummVM on Linux using Kinect!

Through the tireless efforts of a few coders, Strangerke, LordHoto, and Hkz, they have managed to come up with an amazing per-game gesture system. This new Kinect input system recognizes player input and translates it to mouse and keyboard presses which are then processed by the game engine. Unfortunately, this currently only works with the Kinect for Linux drivers.

We're pleased to announce that the next release of ScummVM will have support for several "Living Books" games! It's time to relive your childhood memories (or memories of your children!) and dust off the old discs. The (sadly) now grown-up ScummVM team no longer has all of these games lying around, so we need your help in testing the games to weed out any remaining bugs.

The first batch of supported Living Books games consists of Just Grandma and Me (v1), Arthur's Teacher Trouble, Aesop's Fables: The Tortoise and the Hare, Ruff's Bone, The New Kid on the Block, Arthur's Birthday (v1), Little Monster at School, Harry and the Haunted House, The Berenstain Bears Get in a Fight, Dr. Seuss's ABC, Sheila Rae, the Brave, The Berenstain Bears in the Dark, Stellaluna, and most of Green Eggs and Ham. We hope to support the rest of the games in the future, but in the meantime, we hope that these are enough to keep our loyal users occupied.

Be sure to grab a daily build when testing. If you spot any bugs while enjoying these classic interactive stories or even just complete one, we'd really like to know over on the forums. Be sure to drink your ovaltine post them to the bug tracker; and keep those bug submission guidelines in mind. And if anyone happens to take a few screenshots before nap time and wishes to submit them, we would be eternally grateful.

Like the prospect of spending your summer with the ScummVM team, writing superb code for cool games full time for 12 weeks

Wish to get involved with a leading open source project in its field and become
an asset to its community

Should you apply and be selected you will be rewarded, both financially thanks to Google and with gratitude, encouragement
and the legally mandated minimal amounts of abuse by the ScummVM Team upon completion of a successful project.

You never know, we may even share our secret Grog recipe!

Now run along and pick up some interesting ideas from our Open Tasks
page or be creative and propose your own ideas and apply. Make sure you read our
requirements on the Open Tasks page and review the rest of our
Summer of Code notes on the wiki.

Having participated for several years we cannot stress how beneficial it can be
to apply early, revise your application as you go and really get involved with
the community. The final deadline for applications is April 8th at 19:00 UTC.

Did you ever want to experience the world of the Toons, like in the movies "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" or "Space Jam"? Enter Toonstruck, the zany newly supported game that casts Christopher Lloyd (Great Scott!) as Drew Blanc, a cartoon animator who lands in a place where anything is possible. With his sidekick Flux Wildly, help him to solve the tons of puzzles in order to get back home to the real world!

Take your Bottomless Bag, grab your two Toonstruck CDs, the latest daily build of ScummVM and start testing the game right away! You can find the required datafiles here.

New year, new supported games. And we are proud to announce two of such newly supported games right away!

The first one is the FMV-tastic detective mystery Urban Runner: You are the investigative reporter Max who's being hunted for a murder he didn't commit by both the police and the actual killers. Can you escape your hunters and solve the crime?

The second one is an obscure interactive storybook for children of the Playtoons series: Bambou le Sauveur de la Jungle. We have only managed to find the French version of the game; other language versions may or may not exist. Information on these would be very much appreciated.

CABAL (Coalesced 'Adventures beyond Architecture' League)
finally came alive, and now for real. Yes, truly, it took us just 6.5 years, and today we are eagerly announcing
that a universal adventure game interpreter, playing SCUMM, AGI, and SCI games
has been released.

From now on, it is available on ScummVM's downloads page (Look for version 1.2.0). You may jump straight there, or stay a bit longer
and see what cool new features are included.

As you have probably already realized, this release has support for SCI, and moreover,
the list of compatible games goes beyond
the original FreeSCI which was merged about 1.5 years ago. We support Conquests of
Camelot/the Longbow, Castle/Island of Dr. Brain, Codename: ICEMAN,
EcoQuest 1&2, all four Hoyle games, Freddy Pharkas, Jones
in the Fast Lane, King's Quest I-VI, both Laura Bow games,
Larry up to 6 (low-res 6 only), Police Quest 1-3, Quest for Glory I-III,
Space Quest up to V and a few others.
Incredible work by the FreeSCI team and our own SCI engine team!

Early SCI 16-color games can be optionally undithered by ScummVM, making them look much better.
To see a comparison between undithered graphics and the original, watch
this video produced by one
of our SCI engine developers and see for yourself.

Besides SCI, we have added support for yet another Coktel Vision game called Fascination and
we have a number of new ports: Android, Dingux, Caanoo and OpenPandora. Unfortunately we had
to declare the PalmOS port officially dead.

As usual there are tons of engine-specific bug fixes. Take a look at the
release notes
if you want to know more. But wait! We would like to tell a little bit about
another long-awaited feature new in this release. After all these years we are finally
going international, and the ScummVM GUI can be translated into any language (well,
almost any). Right now we have Catalan, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish
and Ukrainian localizations. Besides this there are a lot of smaller improvements
like tooltips, radio buttons, improved usability and we support more games running
from original media without the need to shuffle the game files.

Following up on the SCI game testing, a testing session for the next ScummVM release has arrived! It's time to point and click at several other ScummVM games that need testing before we can publish a new version.

This testing season we have two new games up for testing: Fascination and Maniac Mansion (C64 version).

Contrary to previous testing seasons, not all games will be tested. The number of games supported has grown significantly and testing all the games is too much. So for this testing season, and testing seasons onward, we've decided to only put games up for testing that have had significant changes to their codebase since the last release. As usual, the list of games to be tested is on the wiki. The page also lists games that are not required to be tested, but feel free to test them too if you don't have any of the other games that require testing.

Note that the SCI games are not on the testing page. The SCI testing went well and they do not need to be tested again.

So what are you waiting for? Go test some ScummVM games using a daily build and report any bugs you find to the bug tracker. After completing a playthrough of a game, please report it on the forums so it can be added to the release testing wiki page. Make sure you provide the version, language, and platform of your game when reporting a completion. Consult the testing guidelines should you have any other questions.

You're Doralice, the cutest airline captain of the Paris-Miami flight. During your last trip, a dying passenger asked you to deliver top secret vials. Will you succeed in your mission, avoiding deadly traps and solving every mystery?

Currently, the PC versions of Fascination are missing an AdLib player, but everything else is there.
Please note that the CD version requires some manipulations and the ScummVM tools to extract the required files.

It's been only six years and a few months since CABAL was jokingly announced, and now the first round of Sierra's SCI games is going to be supported in ScummVM!

However, we need your help in testing the SCI games. That's right, you, the loyal ScummVM user. Go grab your DOS or Windows SCI game (that is on this list) and play through it with a ScummVM daily build. As you play through the game, try not to die too much, save often, and note down any bugs that you find so you can report them on the bug tracker. Please do not report bugs on non-PC versions of SCI games; they are not supported yet.

When you've finished going through a game, go report it on the forums. If you feel up to the challenge, move on to your next SCI game! And if you're really feeling the Sierra vibe, go test all your SCI games that are up for testing!

Even if you don't have any SCI games, you can still help out. There are many SCI demos (only choose those on the supported demo list) and fan games out there that are waiting for you to test them.

Only four weeks since our last release and already ScummVM 1.1.1
is available on our
downloads page.

This release concentrates primarily on fixing bugs, bugs, and even more bugs.
As such, we strongly recommend all and every ScummVM user to update
to this latest and greatest version. In particular, just as promised
we fixed the issues affecting Nippon
Safes Inc and Pajama Sam 1 in 1.1.0.

Another 4 months passed, a lot of hard work done... and finally it is
here: ScummVM 1.1.0 is available now on our
downloads page.

There are some pretty exciting new features: We added support for
16bit graphics, which allowed us to add support for a whole bunch of
newer Humongous Entertainment games for kids. We also added or improved
support for the Amiga versions of Monkey Island, Legend of Kyrandia and
Future Wars. Plus there are two completely new engines for the
games Dragon History (available for free from here)
and TeenAgent (available for free from
GOG.com).
And finally there is now a port for the Nintendo 64 game console!

There is one grain of salt, though: If you want to play Nippon
Safes Inc, we recommend that you stick with your current ScummVM
version for now, as there are some nasty regressions in there which may
even make it impossible to complete the game. Also the background music
in Pajama Sam 1 isn't working correctly in the Kitchen and Mine areas
anymore.

We are not happy about that, but in the end decided that we should
not let this hold up the other new cool stuff we added. Instead, we will
follow up this release in about four weeks with a 1.1.1 release that
should fix these issues. In fact, you can help us make 1.1.1 even better by
reporting any bugs
you might encounter in 1.1.0.

And now go and get it while it's still hot from our downloads page, grab a
build for your favorite device and have fun :).

Today, we would like to announce support for Urban Runner! The game has finally reached a completable state in our subversion tree. Now you can play as Max as he runs from the cops for being accused of a crime he didn't commit. You might even fall in love along the way.

We would really appreciate it if you would go and test this game for us. When you find bugs, go report them here. When you have questions about reporting bugs, go here. Also, if you need a daily build, be sure to check out this page.

This is a great privilege and honor for us, and we would like to share this with you, considering that you are:

A student (undergraduate, graduate, post-graduate, ...)

Like point and click adventures

Know some C++

Looking forward to spending your summer with ScummVM, writing superb code for cool games full time for 12 weeks

If you match all criteria, we would love to invite you to apply as a student. You will be rewarded, both financially by Google
and with fame, gratitude, cherishing and adoration by the ScummVM Team upon completion of a successful project.

Now run, pick some interesting task from our Open Tasks page
or be creative and propose your own ideas and apply. Make sure you read our requirements on the Open Tasks page.

If you have any doubts or questions, feel free to e-mail to scummvm-devel
mailing list or come to #scummvm IRC channel at freenode.net.

To coincide with the updated ScummVM logo, ScummVM t-shirts have also received a touch up. The shirts sport the verb list from Maniac Mansion on the chest, the updated logo on the upper back, and the scummvm.org url on the left sleeve. Shirts are now available in sizes small through 3XL. If you need a larger size, please contact sales[at]combobreaker[dot]com with a request.

Shipping to the USA and Canada is free, and shipping elsewhere is offered at a discounted rate. Head over to Combobreaker.com to pick them up!

Initial reports claim the gold held in the MEGA-BANK vault just began to vanish!
MEGA-BANK Security were asked to review the CCTV footage, however they
were unable to see anything.

Do you think you can solve this mystery?
Are you willing to take the role of Mark Hopper? A teenager hired by the RGB to
infiltrate the mansion of John Noty and discover why and how he is becoming so rich.

The year is 1995. The place is the Czech Republic. You find yourself
surrounded by inventive minds producing the latest Czech point-and-click
adventure, and historically the first Czech CD-ROM-based adventure game. You
are Bert, a young dragon with a taste for adventure. After being corrupted by
an evil magic wand named Eveline, you are desperate to remedy the mischiefs you
created. You decide to set out to find your father who disappeared a while
ago.

It was just 3.5 months ago when we started to prepare for this release, and now finally the
day has come.

Ladies and gentlemen, please greet the one and only ScummVM 1.0.0 "Shiny Logo!" The long
awaited, the most anticipated, the best... whatever.

We worked very hard on stability in this release, and in addition to all
that goodness available since our 1.0.0rc1, we added a new set of ports for Motorola Linux-based
phones (those on MotoEZX and MotoMAGX platforms) and fixed just a few hundred bugs.

The release is available from the usual place,
and the full list of changes can be found right
here in the NEWS file.

Now jump to the downloads page, grab a build for your favorite
device and spread the word that ScummVM is 1.0.0!

As you may have already noticed, we are in the process of switching
from our old trusty logo and icons to new, slightly revised versions. The
main change is that the lowercase "s" has now become an uppercase "S" --
this is meant to help stop the confusion lots of people seem to have
about our name: We are called "ScummVM", and not "scummvm" :-).

Besides that, the new logo was touched up by its original author,
Jean-Marc, to produce higher quality versions (in PNG and SVG format) of
both the logo and the icon. As a result, they look better and yummier
than ever before.

We are not yet completely done converting everything to the new logo
and icon (boy, they are really present in lots of places), but
are actively working on it. The upcoming 1.0.0 release of ScummVM will
be the first to feature the new art everywhere.

As all of you have probably heard, we are still in the testing phase for the 1.0.0 release.
So far we have gotten many testings results, because of you, our fellow users. Thanks again to all
the people who have already done testing for the next release.
Sadly, we are missing some tests for certain games though. Here is the list of games for which we really
need some testing results:

The Manhole

Rodney's Funscreen

Elvira II - The Jaws of Cerberus

Bargon Attack

Goblins 3

Bud Tucker in Double Trouble

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

Nippon Safes Inc.

If you own one of these games please grab a daily build of ScummVM and play through it.
Submit any bugs you discover along the way to the bug tracker.
When you complete a game, report it on the forums so we can add it to our
release testing wiki page. Be sure to provide the version, language,
and platform of the game you're testing (in addition to the name of course) as well as what platform you are testing on. You can find more details
on testing over here.

As you can see on our release testing wiki page, almost all testing results
are from our desktop ports. If you have ScummVM running on console or handheld ports we also ask you to test your games (not necessarily only
the ones mentioned above) there as well, and report your results in the above mentioned way.

Did you hear about our plans for 1.0.0? This is going to be the best ScummVM release ever! And to make it even more remarkable, we have decided to put out a Release Candidate, which is awaiting you here.

It is a regular stable and supported release so don't let the name of 'Release Candidate' or 'RC1' throw you off. We have a
release
testing wiki page for the upcoming 1.0.0 release, which we would like to
see turned into a mass of green indicating successful removal of any issues in
the titles supported, and thus we need your help, our dear users of ScummVM. It
would be really great to test as many games as possible on all varieties of
platforms our project is ported to.

The list of changes which are prepared for you in this release is quite long. The highlights are:

Available in High and Low bitrate versions, all three soundtracks are free to
download and inspired by the original games and the ScummVM software.

"For many years, I have enjoyed the wonders of the ScummVM application
allowing me to play many of my all time favourite point and click adventures.
The ScummVM Music Enhancement Project gives me the chance to inject a little
part of my passion for this gaming genre, while giving the community the option
of alternative music". James Woodcock continues... "A big thank you
to all who have contacted me via email, Twitter and IRC regarding my work and
also of course to the original composers, developers and publishers of the
titles I have covered and the ScummVM team, without who this would not have
been possible!"

A preview of all three games running on ScummVM with James's music is
demonstrated on this
YouTube Playlist.

Change Log:

Simon the Sorcerer v2.0All tracks have been
individually tweaked through a new master compressor to increase
overall quality of the music.

Discworld v2.0Introduction music updated to emphasise the piano tracks,
7 previously missing tracks have now been added completing the soundtrack
and the music is fully compatible with the latest
ScummVM SVN builds for
use within the title.

To find out more, make sure you visit his
website or follow him on
Twitter for new developments.

It's time for everyone's favorite semiannual event! ScummVM Release Testing Season (TM)! However, this season we will be testing for 1.0.0! That's right, 1.0.0!

For this release, we have added support for a bunch of new games: Cruise for a Corpse, Discworld, Discworld 2 - Missing Presumed ...!?, Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2, The Manhole, Return to Zork, and Rodney's Funscreen.

As usual, go grab a daily build of ScummVM, play through the games and submit any bugs you see along the way to the bug tracker. When you complete a game, report it on the forums so we can add it to our release testing wiki page. Be sure to provide the version, language, and platform of the game you're testing (in addition to the name of course). You can find more details on testing over here.

There'll be few of you that don't know that the daily build of ScummVM has supported the first two Discworld games for some time now. Despite the stability of the engine, we held off announcing official support, since we were hoping to be able to simultaneously announce the freewaring of the game titles.

Since it seems unlikely the two games will be freewared in time for the next major release, it's been decided to go ahead and officially announce support for the games. The PC versions of the first two games are fully supported, and the PSX version of the Discworld 1 game is completable (but without music currently).

Inspector Raoul Dusentier has been invited on a cruise by the mysterious businessman Niklos Karaboudjan, and the cruise has barely begun when Raoul stumbles on the man's dead body, and is knocked unconscious.

We are really happy that these art pieces of classic adventure gaming are
available as a relatively easy purchase now, and that ScummVM helped Snowberry
to make them run on modern systems with minimal effort.

If you want to be the envy of everyone in your neighborhood, be sure to be seen around in
your beautiful new ScummVM T-shirt.
Designed with the cooperation of the ScummVM team, this understated and elegant item will
truly show off your adventure game leanings to the initiated. Plus,
combobreaker.com are donating to the ScummVM project
for each one sold!

While we're on the subject of helping ScummVM, please vote for your favorite
point-and-click adventure game engine interpreter in the
Sourceforge Community
Choice Awards. Thanks to all the people that nominated us, we've made
it through to the final round. If you click the link, ScummVM will be pre-selected in the Best
Project for Gamers category, and you can go on and choose your favorite open-source
projects in the other categories.

Consider the following an official "press release", and note that the exact wording
is dictated to cyx and fingolfin by the settlement terms.

In December 2008, members of the ScummVM team discovered that three
games for the Nintendo Wii console ("Freddi Fish: The Case of the
Missing Kelp Seeds", published in Germany under the name "Fritzi Fisch
und der verschwundene Schatz"; "Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's
Dark Outside", published in Germany under the name "Pyjama Pit: Keine
Angst im Dunkeln"; and "Spy Fox: Dry Cereal", published in Germany under
the name "Spy Fox in: Das Milchkartell") made use of ScummVM, without
complying with the terms of the GPL license. They sent a warning letter
to the German distributor of these games, Atari Deutschland GmbH, who
was not aware that ScummVM was used in the creation of the games. Atari
Deutschland GmbH established contact with Mistic Software Inc., the
developers of the games.

Mistic Software Inc. responded by denying that members of the
ScummVM team hold any rights to the particular code they used. The
dispute was ultimately settled in May 2009 by Mistic Software Inc.
paying all legal fees and making a donation to the Free Software
Foundation as a sign of good will, without acknowledging copyright
infringement.

The 3rd free/open source software developers conference
(EL/LAK) is taking place in Athens, Greece on June 19 and 20.
Among the various open source software and related talks, this year ScummVM
will also be participating with a presentation on June 20th.

The presentation intially aims to cover basic principles on how ScummVM
works, its internal architecture and developer team layout.
But we can also talk about adventure games in general, Google Summer of Code,
open source gaming subjects or what ever else comes up!

So if you're around and interested, go forth and
register
for the conference and come by for a meet & greet.
See you there!

Perhaps you haven't noticed, but now ScummVM's website runs new flashy code.
Fredrik Wendel aka [vEX] has been working on it for several months now, and
under the hood it is a complete rewrite with keeping the old design intact... Well, almost.

Now browsing screenshots has a new sleek design, navigation links are
more logical (with keeping the backwards compatibility, so don't worry about
your old links), SCUMM MD5 tables have better design, and the FAQ lost its
magic numbers in the links.

Also we are proud to announce that Fredrik has been appointed
official webmaster for the project, so now you can put all your complaints
into his capable hands. :P

Since ScummVM 0.10.0 there has been unannounced support for subtitles in the Broken Sword 1 cutscenes.

Now we finally managed to provide a package with subtitles for the following languages: English, Brazilian, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Russian. Also, subtitles for the English demo are provided.

The SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards 2009 have started. We invite you to support our little project by casting your vote.

The natural category for ScummVM would be Best Project for Gamers, though if you feel that we could be Best Project, we wouldn't mind much; a project can be nominated for more than one category this year.

The Scary Robot is the mascot of these Awards, and in order to vote for ScummVM, click the mascot or this link.

It was not that long since our previous release, and now here is a new bugfix release hot off the press!

The list of fixed bugs is quite long, and you could read all of it in the release notes, but here is a summary for those of you who are too lazy to follow the links and eager to play the games better.

SAGA: Inherit the Earth is completable again; AGOS, Groovie, Sword2: fixed many sound-related issues; Parallaction: fixed a bug in one of the puzzles; squashed a number of bugs in the GUI. Also iPhone, Symbian, WinCE ports are much improved and NDS and PS2 ports are back again since 0.11.0.

We won't bother you anymore with the details. Go, download ScummVM and enjoy your play!

Yes, you're right: Summer! (In the northern hemisphere, at least ;))
And what did we do the last two years during the summertime?
Yeah, right again: Participate in the Google Summer of Code!
And do you know what we've just learned?
Correct again: We've learned that we're accepted this year as well!

So, if you're a
student,
want to have a great time helping our little project and even earn some money along the
way ($4500 US actually), then join the Google
Summer of Code!

Have you always wanted to work on a big Open Source project, applying your skills (or
acquiring new skills) whilst improving that project, but were always intimidated due to
its apparent monumental size?
Did you ever wish there would be small, pre-cut manageable chunks of work where you
could really show the world what you're made of?
Well, wish no more, because the Google Summer of Code provides exactly these chunks
that don't require you to spend years understanding the whole of the project, and even
offers a monetary reward for your accomplishments.

If you're considering choosing to work on ScummVM (and we would certainly love to have
you), our manageable chunks can be seen at our
Open Tasks page. Of course, if
you have a different interesting idea in your mind, we want to hear that as well!
Please also mind our
project rules.

As we turned to a 6 months release cycle, here is our newest and best ScummVM version for you!

A couple of new engines were added, and besides 2 Humongous Entertainment titles, we now support The 7th Guest and Bud Tucker in Double Trouble.

Among other notable things there is a completely new vector-based GUI, which is a merged work of our last year GSoC student Vicent Marti, as well as a General Main Menu which adds a common save/load interface to most of our engines, adding the much awaited Return to Launcher feature along the way. It was the work of another successful student, Chris Page.

A complete list of new games and features can be found in the release notes, and the latest ScummVM version itself (available for a large number of platforms as usual) is located at the downloads page.

Most attentive users who watch our development list perhaps noticed that there exists yet another SCI1 engine implementation made from scratch. But for the benefit of everyone it was decided that the joint effort is much better.

Of course, don't expect any magic from it. First, the engine is not announced as supported yet. It is in early stages of integration. Then, you should keep in mind that after the merge will settle down, only SCI0, SCI01 and SCI1 games will be supported. However, due to the fact that some of ScummVM developers are interested in SCI development for some time now, we look forward to speeding up the work on the engine.

In the meantime, please, help us some more with 0.13.0 version playtesting.

We are pleased to announce the start of an affiliate program with the excellent Good Old Games service, also known as GOG.com. Just click on their button on the sidebar and you will be brought to the site. Register there and buy some games. You will get your game, cheap, fast and legally, and the ScummVM project will get a share of the proceeds.

The main reason behind this is that GOG.com uses ScummVM for several of their offered titles. Currently they offer Broken Sword 2, Simon the Sorcerer 1, Simon the Sorcerer 2, Feeble Files, Waxworks, as well as some of the free games which we offer too. Each release is nicely pre-packaged with ScummVM, is DRM-free, goes for just $5.99, and the most important thing, is completely legal, as those folks chase the original rights holders.

It is time to announce start of our pre-release testing. Next version of ScummVM is bringing you several new supported games as usual.

The games which were added are: Blue's 123 Time Activities, Blue's ABC Time Activities, Bud Tucker in Double Trouble and The 7th Guest. The procedure haven't changed, same as usual you need daily build of ScummVM, run through the games and submit any bugs you see along the way to the bug tracker. Once you complete the game, report on the forum post so the wiki page could be updated accordingly. We will need the version of the game, language, and platform.

The developers of ScummVM are pleased to announce that as of today, the
classic game Discworld has full support for
James Woodcock's Music
Enhancement Project within the developers build. The project started
way back in January 2006 as James Woodcock committed himself to use the original
MIDI files from various Point and Click Adventure titles, creating enhanced
versions using modern MIDI equipment. He has already released the
Simon the Sorcerer version
and can now add Discworld to his completion list:

"I have tried very hard to remain faithful to the originals in respect to
the excellent composers creations..." says James Woodcock, creator of
the ScummVM Music Enhancement Project. He continues
"...There has been a lot of support and interest from Discworld fans, who have
been monitoring its progress very carefully and it is with great pleasure I can
finally play Discworld using new versions of the original soundtrack with many
thanks to the developers of ScummVM for all their hard work in making this
feature possible".

James uses the Yamaha Tyros2 keyboard hooked up to his computer via USB and
after going through various tweaking, recording and editing, a finalised music
track is born.

With permission from legendary author
Terry Pratchett himself, the
Discworld enhanced soundtrack (version 2.0) will be released in full and
compatible with ScummVM in the future when hopefully we expect the freeware version of the
game will be made available to the public to enjoy all over again.

Henry Stauf cordially invites you to come and sample the delights of
his house in the newest game to be supported by ScummVM, The 7th
Guest. A delightful evening is guaranteed to be had by you and the
other guests.

You will need a copy of the game (DOS and Windows versions only, for
now), and a newly-downloaded daily build of
ScummVM. And, of course, your wits about you.

Please report any unwanted annoyances (i.e. bugs) to the ScummVM
bug tracker. If you find any particularly beautiful sights while
you're there, be sure to submit them as screenshots.

P.S. There are some slight complications involved in copying the game to
the hard drive, due to there being audio tracks on both CDs. The
information on how to get round this is on the 7th Guest wiki
page, as well as a few known issues, so be sure to read it fully.

Ender joined the ScummVM team back in February 2002 and became project co-lead already one month later. The original founders of ScummVM, yazoo and strigeus, were still active, but soon after left ScummVM for other ventures. Ender remained as the sole project leader until March 2003, when Max "Fingolfin" Horn joined him at the steering wheel. The long time leading triumvirate of ScummVM was completed in April 2006 with the addition of Eugene "sev" Sandulenko. Together, we went through many good and bad times.

Ender worked especially hard on the PR side of things, including tons of posts in the news section of this site (we really should post news updates more frequently again!), and many behind-the-scenes negotiations with companies regarding source code releases and other things. Not to mention repeatedly crossing swords with the legal department of LucasArts.

Recently, due to personal issues, Ender has had less and less time to work on ScummVM and related things. Not wanting to harm the project by being unable to devote enough time to take care of important tasks, Ender has graciously agreed to resign his post.

The remaining project leaders, Fingolfin and Sev, would like to thank Ender for his many years of faithful leadership, and wish him all the best in his future endeavors.

Observant users have noticed that there is an updated version of
Flight of the Amazon Queen on SourceForge but not, until now, on the
ScummVM downloads page.

Apart from some minor typographical changes to the license to keep the
legal beagles happy, the only difference compared to the old version
is that it has been compressed using the latest version of the ScummVM
tools. This should fix problems with clicks at the beginning of some
speech, and speech being played a bit too slow. (ScummVM 0.12.0
already has a workaround for the latter problem, so you may not even
notice the difference.)

Many thanks to Alcachofa Soft for releasing as freeware their previously commercial game: Drascula: The Vampire Strikes Back.

It was quite a lengthy process which started in November of 2005. We were contacted by someone who offered us a direct lead to Emilio de Paz from Alcachofa Soft, S.L., the software house that created this game in 1996. Finally in July '07 we received the sources and a few months later they finally freewared it and gave us an official permission distribute the game.

The original version of the game is in Spanish with full voice overs and subtitles. Then there exists an English version with full voice overs and subtitles, and finally there are subtitles in German, French and Italian. Of course, there is also a full musical score which came as a set of audio tracks on the CD (the game was CD-only). We improved the English and Italian translations, and made all that was mentioned here ready for download.

In order to play the game you will need at least the English pack. Then you may optionally download the music pack, and the international pack which contains all those additional languages, Spanish included.

We hope that this will really extend the lifetime of the game and wish the best to Alcachofa Soft.

We can call it a tremendous development. Half a year since 0.11.1 passed pretty quickly, and we are pleased to announce the release of 0.12.0!

This new version of ScummVM adds support for 5 completely new games. The games that now run smoothly on many more platforms than was initially intended are: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Two: Hand of Fate, The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge, Lost in Time, The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble and Drascula: The Vampire Strikes Back.

The number of supported platforms grew as well. The PS2 port has been revived, and the GameCube and Wii are now supported too. Take your Wiimote and make your beloved adventure game protagonist run around the screen :).

No need to go any further into details here, those who want to know the gory details can always refer to the release notes, and all of you are invited to go to our downloads page.

It's that event that occurs about twice a year in which we ask you, our loyal users, to go out and replay all your favorite games supported by ScummVM. In addition to all the games supported from 0.11.1, we have several new ones for you. The Bizarre Adventure of Woodruff and the Schnibble, Lost in Time, The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Two: Hand of Fate, The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge, and Drascula: The Vampire Strikes Back have support added since then. Furthermore, the DOS version of Waxworks and the Macintosh version of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream are now supported.

So, what are you waiting for? Go out and start testing! Grab a daily build of ScummVM and run through the games and note any bugs you see on the way (which you should post on the bug tracker). Once done, post that you've completed the game on the forum post so it can be posted on the wiki page. Be sure to list the version of the game, language, and platform.

Thanks to all our users who voted for us in the preliminaries.
You have to vote for your favorite project one more time (hint: starts with "S", ends with
"VM") to select the best of the best in SourceForge.net.
So head on to the voting place
and vote with your SourceForge.net username.

You know there's something wrong when Count Drascula stops watching TV and starts conspiring
with his faithful sidekick, Igor, to take over the world. And he wants to do that before
tonight's football match starts! You are John Hacker and your mission, should you choose to
accept it, is to rescue your girlfriend Billy Jean from Count Drascula's nefarious clutches
and thwart his plans of world domination!

Even if we won SourceForge's Community Choice Awards 2007 in the game section, ScummVM is not basking in the shadows of yesterday's triumphs.

New games are continuously being worked on, and compatibility for supported ones is being constantly improved. In short, our team is going to sweat its way through the upcoming summer.

We know you think we deserve to win without a fight, but let's do things by the book. So please, help now with the nomination phase and cast your vote for 'Best Project for Gamers' (requires registration at SourceForge).

Procedure for playing is as always: Grab your copy of The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge and a daily build of ScummVM. Also we ask you, our fellow users, to report any bugs you run across to our bug tracker.
Make sure you got all required datafiles before you report a bug though.
For further information, check out the bug submission guidelines.
We also ask for screenshots, which should be reported to our patch tracker. For further information about this, check out the screenshot guidelines.

...and the finger points to you! Or to be precise to Zanthia, youngest of the Kyrandian Mystics. But since she is the one you play in ScummVM's newest supported adventure The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Two: Hand of Fate that is not a big difference. So grab your copy of The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Two: Hand of Fate and a daily build of ScummVM to help her save Kyrandia.

Since we are not finished with supporting every feature, there are still some missing:
Currently we support only the DOS CD-ROM version. Another thing missing is support for the in-game GUI, so saving is possible only via hotkeys. Check out the hotkey section of our README on how to do it.
And last but not least we do not support MIDI output, so make sure you use AdLib as "Music Driver".

UPDATE: The GSoC deadline was extend to April, 7th! The GSoC timeline should be updated soon to reflect this.

Do you enjoy the fabulousness of ScummVM? You still have a chance
to add to it by participating in its development.

Prerequisities: ScummVM, students, and their free time and
desire to take part in the development of one of the most
successful open source projects. Whereas we don't have a
problem with first item, the latter two aren't in a desired
quantity this year.

So, it is your last chance to help us make ScummVM
even better and get paid for it! The deadline of the Google Summer of Code
(we reported it earlier) for student applications is
drawing closer. Officially it is today, March 31st
(although a deadline extension seems likely).

We added several new existing tasks to
Open Tasks list, and we revised some of the old ones.
Take a look now and apply.

Note that your first application draft doesn't have to be
perfect. You have time till April 10th to improve upon it
(see the GSoC timeline).

Do you know what a fabulous time we had last year participating in the Google Summer of Code?
OK, you don't have to answer that, it's a rhetorical question.
Fact is, it was fabulous!
So fabulous we thought we'd apply again.
And Google is so fabulous that they've elected ScummVM to take part again.
Fabulous. (overuse of some words purely intentional).

So, where are you going to spend this summer*?
Again some exotic beach? Perhaps this year on Monkey IslandTM?

Well if you are a
student
and want to make a buck this summer (more accurately $4500 US of them), Google is organizing the absolute
Open Source recruitment drive, also known as the
Google Summer of Code!
The program is designed to create an incentive for students to participate in Open Source projects,
by providing guidance and economic support.
What's more, your favorite project ScummVM is proud to be participating!

Think about it.
Have you ever thought about contributing to a large Open Source project like ScummVM but were intimidated to do so?
With the Summer of Code opportunity, you can put your skills at work under close cooperation with our mentors.
They'll help you ease in the team, plan the task ahead of time with you and guide you all along.

ScummVM continues to leap forward in a leap year, and we are pleased
to announce the next shiny bugfix release of the project.

As usual, it holds a number of improvements, it's more stable, and it
should bring you even more fun than 0.11.0.

We fixed the digital iMUSE system (better COMI experience), King's
Quest 4 bugs were squashed, and support for
fanmade AGI games has been improved; Lure of
the Temptress, Inherit the Earth and I Have no Mouth all
work better since we fixed several crashes, lock-ups and all such buzzwords.

As a special bonus we are glad to announce the return of the BeOS port and the
deeply missed Playstation 2 port.

For a more comprehensive list of improvements you are welcome to visit
the release notes,
but for those demanding to play, the latest and greatest version of ScummVM
waits for you right on our downloads page!

The ScummVM team is currently looking for help with the PlayStation 2 port of ScummVM. We are in need of a second experienced PS2 porter, as the current one is rather busy with other stuff. The port is currently a bit in disrepair, several things need to be brought up to speed. However, the team would help any interested developer to figure out what has to be fixed and how. Contact us via the usual means (if in doubt, just contact Fingolfin).

We are currently gearing up for releasing 0.11.0, and it would be great if the PS2 port could be included with that release. But we realize that the time might be too short to do that effectively, so it's only a bonus, not mandatory.

Reward would be eternal fame and the everlasting gratitude of the PS2 userbase of ScummVM :-).

It is time to announce our next Big Testing SeasonTM. This means that pretty soon you,
our fellow users, will see the new and shiny ScummVM version.

We have extended the set of our supported games by 8 new (or old :) ) games.
The list includes:
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Lure of the Temptress,
Elvira - Mistress of the Dark, Elvira II - The Jaws of Cerberus,
Waxworks (Amiga version only), and early Sierra preAGI games
Mickey's Space Adventure, Troll's Tale, and
Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood.

There are detailed instructions on how to perform testing in a helpful way.
You will find them on our
Wiki page. Please
stick to those and report on our mailing list, in #scummvm or on
our forums. The
current list of tested games can be found
here.

Help rescue Elvira in Elvira 1/2, and resolve a family curse in Waxworks.

Get the latest daily build of ScummVM and your version of the game and fight the evil! We ask you, our fellow users, to report any bugs you find in our bug tracker, following the bug submission guidelines. Any unrecognized versions should be reported to the tracker as well. Screenshots are also needed, which can be submitted using the appropriate guidelines for screenshot submission.

We hope you enjoy yet another great adventure game series under ScummVM!

ScummVM now adds another freeware title to its list of games: Lure of the Temptress,
which was the first game to use Revolution Software's Virtual Theatre engine. Players must help Diermot escape
imprisonment, unravel the mysteries surrounding the Skorl occupation of the town, and eventually defeat the evil
enchantress that controls them.

You have probably noticed that ScummVM was recently ported to the iPhone. In fact, since yesterday
the blog community picked up this news and started talking.

That is basically why we are going against our settled procedures this time and will
announce this port even though it is not supposed to be official yet, but is in its early beta
stages.

The port mentioned above was created by Oystein Eftevaag aka Vinterstum.
Through continuous efforts of the ScummVM Team in the last six years it was not that
difficult to make, and the basic port was created in less than a week.

As we've mentioned, it is not yet official, so you will not find it in its usual place
on our downloads page, but you should visit this
Wiki page which has full download and usage directions.

Remember, that we in no way support piracy of any kind, and discussing it
will get you quickly banned on our forums and official IRC channel.

We have prepared a
list of
online shops where you can buy many of the supported games. And of course, there are
Beneath a Steel Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen on our
downloads page which were freewared thanks to our
project.

Well, somehow it slipped by us this year, but the ScummVM project was technically six years old on the 5th of October (based on our
founding date on SourceForge. But don't worry! Due to popular demand, we have rescheduled our Birthday to Jan 15th, to coincide with the release of
ScummVM 0.1.0!

Over the years, ScummVM has grown from a project ludde started to run Monkey Island ('to see if he could'), to a series of
interpreters capable of playing a wide-range of games on a huge number of operating systems, platforms and devices. We would like to thank all of
those who have helped us grow over the years from our developers, contributors and users. Some companies and groups deserve special mention (but all
of you are great, so don't feel left out...):

SourceForge - For hosting us over the years, and giving us the chance
to come runner up in the 2006 Community Choice Awards (Gaming Category) and WIN (Best Project for Gamers) this year

Revolution Software - Tony Warriner and Charles Cecil for
their ongoing support - And providing code, assisting our efforts in Beneath a Steel Sky/Broken Sword and freewaring some of these games!

John Passfield/Steve Stamatiadis - For providing the source
code for Flight of the Amazon Queen, supporting our efforts, and also allowing us to re-release this wonderful game as freeware!

Wyrmkeep Entertainment - And Joe Pearce, for his great assistance in
providing source code, adding Inherit the Earth and early SAGA support

Adventure Soft - Alan Bridgman and Simon Woodroffe, formerly of
AdventureSoft - For sharing the AGOS source for Feeble Files, and their support with Simon/AGOS support

Sold Out Software - Now Mastertronic, for not being afraid to use ScummVM on their commercial budget
re-issues of Broken Sword 1/2

Google, for allowing us to participate in the Summer
of Code this year (and to all students who participated)

Help Gorrister, Ellen, Benny, Nimdok and Ted to overcome their fatal flaws and fight the crazed super computer AM.

Get the latest daily build of ScummVM and your English, German, French, Spanish or Russian version of the game and fight the evil super computer! We ask you, our fellow users, to report any bugs you find in our bug tracker, following the bug submission guidelines. Any unrecognized versions should be reported to the tracker as well. Screenshots are also needed, which can be submitted using the appropriate guidelines for screenshot submission.

The newest version of the Nintendo DS port of ScummVM is now available.
This release brings ScummVM DS port in line with the other ports of ScummVM.
Games new to the DS version this time round include the later entries in
the Goblins series, Future Wars, and Sierra AGI games. There are also
plenty of speed improvements which should make your ScummVM DS port
experience a lot smoother.

Thanks a bunch to everybody who voted for us. Now the final ballot is waiting for your votes. ScummVM is in the running for best project for gamers and best project!!! Just go to the Community Choice Awards and cast your vote.

"What's new? What's in it? Can I open it up yet?" - Hah, I can already see you shifting impatiently on your seats. But before you run, let me shed some light on the details of this latest installment of the successful ScummVM series:

Several new engines and thus new games supported:

Sierra AGI engine: Space Quest I & II, King's Quest I-III and many more, including a vast number of fan-made games,

Cinematique evo 1 engine: Future Wars,

GOB engine: Bargon Attack, Gobliins 2, Goblins 3, Ween: The Prophecy,

AGOS engine: Simon the Sorcerer's Puzzle Pack,

Parallaction engine: Nippon Safes Inc.,

Touche: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer engine.

DXA movies (higher quality than MPEG2) can be compressed better now and can be used for the Broken Sword cutscenes.

Added 'Mass Add' feature to the Launcher, which allows you to scan for
all games in all subdirectories of a given directory (to use it, press
shift then click on "Add Game").

P.S.: The SourceForge.net download mirrors are a bit slow when it comes to syncing, hence it can happen that your download fails or is corrupt after the first try. Don't give up, just try to download from another mirror!

Once again, SourceForge is holding a vote to see which projects are most loved by the community.

Last year, ScummVM nearly won in the gaming category, losing the first place to the Xbox Media Center project (which, we may add, does not allow you to play classic adventure games on your Xbox).

Everyone should quickly login to their SourceForge account (or create one if they haven't got one yet) and go to the voting page to vote for ScummVM!

After you're done clicking, choose the "Best Project for Gamers" category. Feel free to do the same in the "Best Project" category. Note that this is only the first round of the election. The projects which get most votes now in each category will be selected for a second and final election round.

Hello there ScummVM users! It's that time of year again where we ask you to test your games while we gear up for a new release, and this time it's for 0.10.0. While the official Big Testing Season(TM) begins on May 23, we ask that you begin testing games now, except for AGOS games (Simon the Sorcerer series, Feeble Files) and Nippon Safes.

There are several new games for 0.10.0 including Touche: The Adventure of the Fifth Musketeer and Future Wars. In addition, DrMcCoy has been extra busy and dealt us Gobliins 2, Goblins 3, Ween: The Prophecy and Bargon Attack. Also, Nippon Safes will be included in this release. This release will also feature the AGI games from the merge with Sarien.

There are detailed instructions on how to perform testing in a helpful way.
You will find them at our
Wiki page. Please, stick to those and report on our mailing list, on #scummvm or in our forums. The current list of tested games can be found here.

The blazingly fast addition of Goblins 3 was gracefully performed thanks to the not-so-big differences from Gobliins 2.

For you, an average peasa... adventurer, that means that YOU can reach an agreement between King Bodd and Queen Xina.

Will you succeed? Find out by grabbing your old copy of Goblins 3 from your dusty shelves, combining it with a shiny new ScummVM 0.10.0svn (check the build date, it has to be after April 21, 2007, yes, 2007).

Google has announced the final allocations of students to the projects
participating in the Summer of Code program this year.
So far, it has been a tremendous success, with over 6200 applications being submitted and over 900 students being accepted.

ScummVM received 37 applications and was finally awarded 7 slots for students who will work on
a variety of tasks,
under close and relentless supervision by _sev, Fingolfin, LordHoto and Jubanka.
So Kari, David, Timothy, Sean, Andreas, Serhiy and Zbigniew welcome aboard!
Competition was fierce, we had to drop several good applications, so for those of you who
did not make it, don't despair.
If you still believe your proposed task was cool, it should be done but just didn't make the final cut,
and if you feel up to it, you can coordinate with us and go ahead with it anyway.
ScummVM always welcomes code contributions!
After all, that's the whole point of SoC: Getting people involved in open source :-)

You think RTS and ScummVM don't fit together? Of course they do! As you know, we have support for The Legend of Kyrandia for some time now. Now, after some work, we have parts of Dune 2 working with extensions to our Kyrandia code. However, there are only a few things working correctly. At least the introduction sequence works like a charm by now (check the screenshots).

Also the mentat is basically working, although it misses some animation sequences. Last but not least, the only in-game support we have so far is map loading, but there are some other things that you can't see on screenshots now. So stay tuned and wait for the first RTS supported by ScummVM!

As the code is still a work in progress, it has not been committed yet. But, look for it within the next couple of days when LordHoto has a bit more working.

Ok, so we all know this is an April Fool's joke. But, truthfully, Dune 2 does share several of the resources of the Kyrandia games. Furthermore, parts of the screenshots seen here were extracted using a Kyrandia tool (as LordHoto says). This still doesn't mean support will be added though.

So, where are you going to spend the summer*?
Some exotic beach?
Perhaps Mêlée IslandTM?

Well if you are a
student
and want to make a buck this summer (more accurately $4500 US of them), Google is organizing the absolute
Open Source recruitment drive, also known as the
Google Summer of Code!
The program is designed to create an incentive for students to participate in Open Source projects,
by providing guidance and economic support.
What's more, your favorite project ScummVM is proud to be participating!

Think about it.
Have you ever thought about contributing to a large Open Source project like ScummVM but were intimidated to do so?
With the Summer of Code opportunity, you can put your skills at work under close cooperation with our mentors.
They'll help you ease in the team, plan the task ahead of time with you and guide you all along.

Bargon Attack, which like Ween: The Prophecy shares most of the code with Gobliins 2, is now completable and supported. Hence, we ask you to catch up with the Bargonians and hunt for bugs along the way.

The project also covers other titles, such as Beneath A Steel Sky, Discworld, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Inherit the Earth and another title yet
to be announced!

As soon as the ScummVM software has been tested with the new soundtrack
provided, James has promised to release the full selection of music from Simon
the Sorcerer on his own website free of charge. There are already sample
downloads for many of his projects, so make sure you pop over to the
ScummVM Music Enhancement
Project homepage.

As some of you may already be aware of, the engines of Gobliins 2 and Ween: The Prophecy share a lot of code. The differences have now been taken care of and we therefore add it to the list of our supported games. As always, we'd like you, our users, to report any still existing bugs.

Way back in May of last year, Sarien merged with ScummVM. Not only does this give you the great opportunity to relive those long lost childhood memories of defeating the evil Sariens in Space Quest alongside thwarting LeChuck's evil doings in Monkey Island, but it also gives you the chance to create some new memories, such as searching for the ingredients for a magic recipe in the fan made game, Voodoo Girl: Queen of the Darned. There are over 180 AGI fan games that have been made using something like WinAGI or AGI Studio that can be played in ScummVM. Luckily for us, sev has made a compilation of them that can be found here (thanks to clemmy for hosting it).

"Why are you telling me this?" you might ask. Well, the gauntlet has been thrown down. We need you, the ScummVM users, to go write a description for the wiki for the fan games, using the syntax written in this forum post. Then, post it there as well. This way, the wiki editors can post it on the wiki.

In addition, we ask that you test both Sierra's AGI games and fan made games using ScummVM. As usual, you will need a daily build. However, we ask that you check if a bug in an AGI fan game is present in the original interpreter as well. If you find any bugs, please report them to the bug tracker.

We have had an amazing response to our fundraiser, managing to reach our target of $950 in just over 24 hours! The response was simply amazing, and thanks to these
donations several key team members will soon be the proud owners of some shiny new copies of the latest release of IDA - The Interactive Disassembler.

This will be a great help in adding new game support, and fixing some of the odder bugs in our current game engines, so once again we thank all users that have donated.
Everyone on the team is amazed at the support you've shown, and we're planning a few surprises down the line to help thank everybody. Please check our Donor List to see how many donations we received, and to read everybody's comments. (Note that only donors who supplied a comment are listed).

However, although the fundraiser is closed, (and especially if you didn't donate in this round), please consider donating in the future if you enjoy ScummVM. We can always
use donations to help purchase game software and rare versions to increase our support and compatibility — every dollar or euro is appreciated!

Some time ago PayPal approached us and told us that we could no longer
use their system to accept donations. It was a precedent, which was
even highlighted on Slashdot. But as you may imagine, it could potentially put many
projects into a very unpleasant situation.

Fortunately, thanks to the very good folks at
SourceForge we now have this issue resolved. They were able to help negotiate
an exception with PayPal, allowing us to continue to accept PayPal donations
via SourceForge.

We also would like to use this opportunity to announce a fundraiser. As you may
know, we are widely using Interactive Disassembler from
DataRescue. So far most of us have
been using the freeware version, but it has many serious limitations (which
obviously makes it free). We conducted negotiations with DataRescue and received a very
generous discount. We would really like to buy 5 IDA Pro licenses for several key
team developers who will be able to use it at full extent. So if you would really like
to see the project going steady and support for even more games added, consider
to donating a couple of dollars or euros.

Our target is $950 US dollars and whilst this no small goal, taking into
account more that 2,5 millions downloads, 15,000+ web visitors per day and almost 5,400
registered forum users we feel that it is very achievable.
Please, use the SourceForge
donation system to make your donations.

Every now and then somebody will raise the subject of finding
a 'better' name for ScummVM, one that fits better with it's modern
scope (which extends well beyond SCUMM games). So
at this page
we present you with some nice alternatives. Choose whichever suits you
best -- but we will stay ScummVM.

It was a complete surprise to all of us, but our old-timer Gregory
Montoir aka cyx several weeks ago submitted a practically finished
engine. It is used by the game Touché:
The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer.
Some more work has been performed, and now we are announcing full support
for this title.

For you, our fellow users, this means that we are starting a great bug-hunting
session. Grab your English, French, German or Italian, or even just the game
demo and start testing. Stick Geoffroi Le Brun's nose in every hole in the game
and report if it unexpectedly gets broken.

As usual, to play the game you will need a daily
build of ScummVM. Bugs and graphical glitches should be submitted to
our
bug tracker, and please, follow the bug
submission guidelines. Also, if you encounter some yet unrecognized
version, report it to the same tracker.

Screenshots are required as well. Besides, we are still waiting for
Future Wars screenshots as nobody submitted any yet.

We are sure that you will enjoy this yet another gem stone now supported by
ScummVM.

As you may know, some time ago we adopted the
cinematique
evo.1 engine, which was maintained by Yaz0r. The engine is used by two games:
Future Wars and
Operation Stealth.
Now, after several months of work, we are pleased to announce support for Future Wars
in daily SVN builds of ScummVM.

Currently only the DOS version is supported, but in a variety of
languages.

We would like to ask you, our fellow users, to perform testing for us.
However, it does not mean that the next major release is near, but that we are ready
for bug reports.
So, grab your copy of the game (if you own it) and test every
bit of it. You will need a daily build of ScummVM and
your protection booklet handy in order to run the game. Then, if a bug, glitch,
or even if a console message pops up, please report it. Instructions on
reporting bugs can be found here.

As some of you may have noticed, the Mac OS X version of ScummVM 0.9.1 had
some issues when running on PowerPC machines, particularly when playing MP3
encoded sound. A new build (0.9.1a) is now up on the
downloads page, for anyone affected (All
versions beyond the Mac OS X version remain the same).

There were lots of important bugfixes and small improvements. We are also
glad that three additional platforms are now officially supported: Nintendo DS,
GP2X and GP32. You can already download official DS and GP2X binaries, and
the GP32 port will be available soon.

Some of the most significant bugfixes are:

Many fixes for Humongous Entertainment games and better support for
international versions of the games

Improved detection of the FM-TOWNS version of Indy3

Several fixes for The Feeble Files and more non-English versions are supported now

Some parts of the Kyrandia engine were rewritten so the game needs less CPU power now,
and thus works better on lower-end devices

The PSP, PS2 and WinCE ports were greatly improved

The PalmOS port is again up-to-date and features separate build for Tapwave Zodiac

As regular ScummVM web-viewers may have noticed already, we have removed the Paypal button from
our site and no donations are currently being accepted.

Paypal has informed as that all software capable of playing a game on a system 'it was not sold for' is in
violation of their AUP. Please
feel free to e-mail aup@paypal.com and express your disappointment at their policies... Which make absolutely no
sense for a project like ScummVM, which is often actively assisted by the original game developers and studios,
even to the point of being shipped by Sold Out in their Broken Sword 1/2 compilation.

We are investigating alternatives for a donation system, if any of our users would like to put forward a
suggestion of a safe, open-source friendly system please let us know in the "Paypal Sucks" forum thread.

As many users of the Windows CE port have noticed, the 0.9.0 release
has some sound and music related issues which usually ended with a crash.
The obscure bugs were hunted down and corrected.
We urge all PocketPC and Smartphone users to download the updated 0.9.0a
build from our
downloads page
or our SourceForge files section.
It may be a while until all mirrors pick up the file, so be patient.

Greetings, citizens. The OmiBrain facility ScummVM Team needs you to do game testing.

As usual, we prepared many new features for you and killed zillions of bugs.
That means that every supported game needs retesting.

There are 2 completely new games which we introduce in 0.9.0. The Legend of Kyrandia
and The Feeble Files. Also there are few Humongous Entertainment games where
compatibility bumped significantly, Pajama Sam 3 is among them. So, please, find
your old game media or buy some more and enjoy the gameplay of these classics.

There are detailed instructions on how to perform testing in a helpful way.
You will find them at our
Wiki page.
Note, that the guidelines have changed a bit since last Big Testing Season(TM) which you
performed for 0.8.0. Please, stick to those and report on our mailing list,
on #scummvm or in our forums.

As you may have noticed, we are now including the AGI engine in our
development source tree aka SVN. This engine allows you to play early versions
of games such as Larry 1, Space Quest 1&2, King's Quest 1-4, Police Quest
1, and numerous fanmade games. It is based on the Sarien code, with its authors
expressed permission.

We would also like to clarify that we don't have any plans to add support
for SCI games in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, AGI is an in-development
engine, so it will not be included in the upcoming 0.9.0 release.

We're proud to announce that ScummVM support for The Legend of Kyrandia is now complete!

This means that we now need you, our users, to give us a helping hand.
In order to root out any remaining bugs, extensive testing is sorely needed.
So, please dig upyour (legal!) copies of Kyrandia 1, download a SVN snapshot of
ScummVM and the required Kyra data file from the Downloads page, and post any bugs you find to our
Bug
tracker :). Any other issues can be discussed in the forum.

Currently both CD and floppy editions are supported in their own language.
English, French, German and Spanish versions are fully supported, but any other
PC (and hopefully Mac) version should work as well (albeit with some text in
English, and some interface graphics missing). If you have an unsupported
version, we'd love to hear from you! Note that Amiga versions are unfortunately
not supported at all at this time.

Today we are very happy to announce that Eugene "sev" Sandulenko has been elevated to the rank of project leader, meaning we now have a trio at the steering wheel of ScummVM.

Eugene contributed in major ways to ScummVM, going beyond what could reasonably be expected from a regular team member. He worked on several new engines in ScummVM, the new GUI code, managed several of our releases, played a central role in our recent switch to Subversion, motivates other people to do useful work, and many other things.

Congratulations, Eugene, and we hope to see a lot more of your great work in the future. :-)

In other news, the final results of the SourceForge.net2006 Community Choice Awards are now public, and ScummVM made an honorable second place in the Games category, only beaten by Xbox Media Center (some people are debating how game-like this is, but then, ScummVM itself isn't a game either, so let's not complain :-). Thanks again to everybody who voted for us.

Thanks a bunch to everybody who voted for us. But you can do better: Since the final ballot is up and running now, you can vote again for us, and all your other favorite projects. Just go to the Community Choice Awards and cast your vote. You can do so until March 23, so don't be tardy or it'll be too late :-).

Dear ScummVM users!
We just discovered that SourceForge.net is currently doing a nomination round for their first annual Community Choice Awards. The good thing: ScummVM has been chosen to be one of the pre-selected candidates. The catch: The nomination round is already closing tomorrow!

So, if you would like to support us, go to the Community Choice Awards Nominations page, enter the "Games" subsection and nominate ScummVM. And of course, you can and should do the same in all the other categories for those projects you think deserve it.

After the nomination round, voting on the top five nominees begins March 17th. Details are not yet known, but chances are that this will be public once again. So keep out an eye on this, and just in case a certain project with a green slimy "S" in its logo makes the cut... you know what you should do ;-).

Thanks to SourceForge.net, we got
the opportunity to move to a more powerful and advanced versioning system than CVS:
We are now using Subversion,
also known as SVN. In case you wonder, a versioning system is a tool for
collaborative software development. As you probably know, the ScummVM Team consists
of more than 30 active core developers, and many more are on our list of past and
present contributors. Working on a project on this scale just would not be
possible without the help of such a system.

From the very beginning, Ludvig Strigeus committed his initial ScummVM version to CVS,
the versioning system we used until recently. Vincent Hamm joined him shortly
thereafter. Since then, a lot has changed, many things have happened. We have more than
20,000 revisions of ScummVM and its various components in our CVS repository.

We now moved to a new system, Subversion. Compared to CVS, it adds many useful new
features, that allow us to work more efficiently on ScummVM, something we are sure
all our users will appreciate. Among other things, there will be no more lag between
anonymous and developers version of the source code -- you get everything we do
instantly!

If you used a CVS checkout so far, scrap it, install a
Subversion client and
checkout

https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/scummvm/scummvm/trunk/

If you are using the command line subversion client, that means you simply have to
type the following command:

Due to a bug discovered in 0.8.1, which rendered Broken Sword 2
unplayable, we're forced to release ScummVM 0.8.2 "Broken Broken Sword 2".
Also, we used this opportunity to fix the WinCE builds, as well as
the MacOS X bundle.

As usual, you can get builds for all supported platforms on our
downloads page

Rejoice, ScummVM 0.8.1 "Codename: missing" has just been released.
You can now experience the latest official flavour of ScummVM. The main reason
for this release is fixing several bugs that slipped into 0.8.0, some of these
fixes are:

Much improved support for Humongous Entertainment games

Support the German version of Maniac Mansion NES (thanks to
Joachim Eberhard for contributing the cartridge)

Fixed overflow when using control panel for the robot in the Dig

Fixed disappearing cursor when level password is typed in Gobliiins

Implemented more precise MD5-based game detection for Simon the Sorcerer

As you may have noticed, there is a
big discussion
about the BASS score on our forums. James Woodcock, one of the participants,
has posted on his blog
a couple of remastered tracks from the original MIDI.

Although ScummVM does not yet support this in it's full glory, we are looking at
implementing this in the near future, so keep watching. In the mean time
we recommend you to go and feel the future of what ScummVM hopes to provide.

At long last, ScummVM CVS now has basic support
for The Legend of Kyrandia by Westwood Studios. The game is fully completable, but lacks music,
sound effects and a menu system (for now). Please refer to section 3.8 of the
README for more
information, and to the Downloads section for the
necessary datafile. All bugs should be reported to our
bug tracker, please see section 4.10 of the FAQ for
instructions.

We're pleased to announce the availability of the long-awaited build of ScummVM
version 0.8.0 for PocketPC 2002, thanks to Kostas Nakos. You can get it
from our download page. It may happen that some mirrors haven't picked up the
file yet, in which case try a different mirror.

Some interesting news for you. Wyrmkeep Entertainment Co. has released the
ITE Soundtrack on CD. You may listen to a preview and buy it from
here. ScummVM supports
this game as of 0.8.0, thanks to our tight collaboration with Wyrmkeep
and the fact that they kindly provided us with all source code and the rights to
reimplement it. Support this great company by purchasing the game soundtrack
and, of course, the game itself, which you can play using ScummVM.

As you can read here, we (joostp and lavosspawn) have the ambition to create an audibly improved version of BASS by using the high quality studio source material, which is stored on DATs (Digital Audio Tape).

At this point we have these DATs in our possession and are looking for help in getting the audio off them.
Since we're not in the position to send the tapes anywhere, we're looking for someone to lend us a DAT player/recorder for about 2 weeks to complete this first step.
The DAT player would need to be shipped to the Netherlands, and will be returned upon completion of the task.

If you think you can help out, please get in touch!
For more information, see the forum thread.

Hi. Just over a year after our design contest ended we're proud to finally announce the
launch of the new web design. Thanks to Draven for the design and Yaroslav Fedevych
for most of the HTML/CSS code. For curious souls the old website is still available
here.

The first binary release of the PlayStation 2 Port has now been posted to our forums in this thread. It was not added to the download pages as it still needs some testing. If you've got a PlayStation 2 with a modchip, grab it and tell us about your results.

In light of the 0.8.0 release, which requires the additional SKY.CPT file to run Beneath a Steel Sky, we've updated the archive of the freeware CD version to include this file, and while we were at it, updated the data files to the last-known released version of BASS, which should fix some text issues that appear when playing the game in non-english languages.

You can download it from the downloads page (whenever the SourceForge mirrors pick it up), or download the SKY.CPT file separately here.

You may find a more detailed list of changes as well as files to download at our
downloads page. We encourage
you to update to this latest and best ScummVM version as soon as possible.

Along with this release, we are also pleased to announce the launch
of our new forums. Located
at the easy to remember address of http://forums.scummvm.org/, the
new forums feature individual sub-forums for Ports, and many new functions
for both the users and moderators alike.

Please note that the SourceForge.net forums will be closed and archived
within the next 48 hours. These archives will be available from the
bottom of the forums' Main Index page.

The last bastion of the screenshots camp has fallen. We have just received Zak v1 shots
and that means that all is done. Thanks a lot to you, our fellow users, who took part in
this saga. There are too many of you to mention, but you know who you are.

We also need to test another couple of newly supported games. These are Maniac Mansion
NES version and Zak McKracken Commodore 64. See sections 3.8 and 3.9 in our README on
how to run these. We need to know whether these games are completable or not.

If you like screenshots as much as we do, you can play an integral role in
demonstrating the capabilities of ScummVM with merely single still-frame image.

Basically, we need you to submit screenshots for our screenshots gallery. We have an
explanation of the proper way to do so
here in our wiki.

So, if you've got a few minutes, an interesting save in the middle of a game, and you want
to help, please feel free to take and submit a screenshot of it. As the wiki states,
ScummVM should be in HQ2x mode with aspect ratio correction ON.

Due to a local space/time vortex which will in the future be located near Earth,
the meaning of 'regularly' may be in flux. Stay tuned for further updates.

And now, to current news:

We're happy to report that Ron Gilbert, co-creator of Maniac Mansion and SCUMM, made
a nice reference to ScummVM on his website (Grumpy
Gamer. Or so we hear from Slashdot,
which seems to have brought his site to its knees :)

Please note, however, that the Nintendo DS port mentioned is not yet an official or
supported port. So please don't contact us about it, because we can't help :)

The contents of Rons latest post has been quoted in this
blogspot post. For the record, we've given Ron the nod in our readme.txt since Wed Apr 17
17:31:05 2002 (UTC).

We're also calling for testers to report problems with 'Inherit the Earth' (details and purchase information
behind the link!). Please use the bug tracker, and set the correct game under Group.
Please only test with the latest CVS version. Thanks!

On the downside, we really need to post news more regularly. On
the upside, we have accumulated a lot to tell you about:

New Ports

Ports are important for us -- that much we have in common with the good
ol' pirates from Monkey Island. Of course in our case it's not the wet
kind (with ships and stuff), but rather ports of ScummVM to different
architectures. On that front, we have some pretty nice things coming up
for the next ScummVM release, including an official PlayStation 2 port, as well as the AmigaOS port now being official, too. And
with some luck maybe even the often requested EPOC/Symbian port will
finally be a regular part of ScummVM (take a look at the relevant
patch tracker item
if you are curious).

New games

We added a new game engine, this time for Coktel's Gobliiins series. So
far, Gobliiins 1 is completable. Work on the other parts (Gobliins 2,
Goblins 3, and "The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble")
has not yet begun, but at least Gobliins 2 seems to be similar to part 1, so we hope to have that in the foreseeable future, too.
Regarding the other parts, we'll see...

Thanks to the hard work of some dedicated people we also finally
support the (in)famous NES version of Maniac Mansion. Wow, that should
be about the last LucasArts SCUMM game we were not supporting ... ;-)

Support for Humongous Entertainment's
kids games is progressing well, the following titles can be
completed with the current development version of ScummVM:

Freddi Fish 1 - 4

Pajama Sam 1 & 2

Putt-Putt (several titles)

Spy Fox 1 & 2

Several arcade titles

New thumbs

No, I didn't undergo plastic surgery (although another pair of thumbs sounds tempting...).
Rather, we added support for thumbnails in SCUMM savegames.
Pretty cool stuff, click here for a screenshot.

Not too shabby, we think. And we actually have more really cool stuff in the works,
stay tuned.

We are pleased to announce the release of ScummVM 0.7.1. This update
concentrates on fixing bugs from 0.7.0, especially in the Windows Mobile
port (PocketPC / Smartphone). For more information check out the
release notes.

We now have an extensive list of boot params for Fate of Atlantis on our
boot params page. Many
thanks to Laura Abbott who spent a lot of time to compose this list and
then generously donated it to us. I am sure this will help us working on
FOA issues in the future.

In other news, Robert Kelsen has volunteered to work as a SlackWare
packager, and has started by providing a
SlackWare binary of 0.7.0.
Way to go, Rob!

So, apparently, some people actually read our news section... I am
astonished ;-). Thanks to all of you out there who contribute to ScummVM
by providing us with useful feedback, and the occasional praise -- both
really help keeping up interest in working on ScummVM!

I guess it's time for the usual, regular, monthly sign of life, "Yes, we are alive.
No, we still won't merge with FreeSCI. Yes, you can donate your Ferrari to me, I might
reconsider then."
As usual, lots of small and big things happened, we might post some info in the not
too distant future. In the meantime, I'd like to set a spotlight on a small but nifty
detail, maybe it'll be of interest/use to some of you...:

Some time ago, we added a list of boot params
to our documentation section. Maybe you have already noticed it, if not, check it out.

In case you don't know what a boot param is (shame on you!), I actually tried to explain
it on that page, so, have a look anyway ;-).
If you think the explanation is not clear enough, drop me a line and tell me how to improve it.

And if you really want to feel cool, you can even contribute a bit here and help us out
by filling in some of the gaps in our boot param tables. Once again, see
the boot param page for more information.

We just wanted to let you know that since the release of ScummVM 0.7.0 a week
ago, a few more binaries have arrived at your download page.
We now offer binaries for the following systems:

Windows

Mac OS X

Linux: Fedora Core

Solaris 8

PalmOS

PocketPC (WinCE)

Dreamcast

BeOS

... and hopefully the Debian package will be ready soon.

That's already quite nice, but more never hurts. For example, it would be nice to have
packages for Mandrake, Slackware, Solaris x86, or your favorite toaster.
So if you are interested in joining us as a packager, please contact us.

And now for something completely different: Taking a look at our project statistics page, you might notice that we have now more than 10,000,000 page views (accumulated over the total life time of ScummVM as a SourceForge.net project), and have served more than 1.1 million downloads since our conception.
Not too shabby, we think :-)

We are proud to announce the release of ScummVM 0.7.0, right in time for Christmas Eve!

While not quite as ground breaking as some of our previous major releases, this version sports some notable improvements and additions, amongst them:

Added preliminary support for 26 Humongous Entertainment titles

Added support for FLAC (lossless) encoded audio files

Added native support for Macintosh versions of some SCUMM games -- this means the 'rescumm' tool is now mostly obsolete, and you can now play those games directly from the original CD

Added smooth horizontal scrolling for The Dig, Full Throttle and COMI
(matching the original engine)

Added support for compressed speech and music in Broken Sword 1 and 2

And as usual, we fixed lots and lots of bugs

A link to the release notes and a more detailed list of changes can be found over on the downloads page, along with the download links.
Updating to this latest and greatest version is strongly recommended to all our users.

It's been almost two months since we started our website design contest, and I know some of you have been eagerly awaiting the outcome. Since the team couldn't quite decide on who should be winner, we let you, our dear users, have a word in the outcome of this epic battle. And finally, we are happy to let it be known that after about 1400 votes we do have a clear winner! And it is... draven, with a strong majority of 55% of all votes! Congratulations, draven!

So what now? We'll be settling the issue of the prize(s) for the winning entry in the next few days, and start working on implementing the new design. We consider doing some further tweaks to it (like, some people suggested to actually use the logo of jeanm's submission; and we have some other ideas up our sleeves). This may take some time, partially because it's a holiday time for a lot of us. So I am afraid you'll have to be a bit more patient.

you are probably all wondering Whatever happened to that website design contest?
It's been closed over a month ago and there is still no winner!.
Well, good question :-)

First off, let me tell you that some of the submitted designs are
really awesome, and I would hereby like to thank all the people who submitted their
work. Sorry for letting you wait so long on the outcome.

Now, to determine the winner, we conducted an internal poll with the team. This took some time
until all team members were able to submit their filled out forms.
That process didn't produce a clear winner, though. So then, some of us
wanted to conduct a poll amongst you, dear users, to pick the winner out of
the three finalists. For various reasons, that just didn't happen...
until now!

Go to our poll page to see the finalists, and to
be able to poll on them! We'll let this polling go for about 14 days, at which point
we'll finally decide on the winner.

On another matter, we have now started work on the next major release of ScummVM.
0.7.0 is (rather aggressively) scheduled for Christmas 2004! We hope to be able to deliver
a nice christmas present to you this way. But for this to work out, we need your help:
We need people who actively test the latest CVS so that we can iron out and fix all
remaining issues with it, to ensure a high quality release.

That's it for today, hopefully the next time around we can announce something more substantial
(like a new release or a new website). Until then: happy play testing to all of you!

P.S.: Maybe you also have been wondering Gee, will these guys ever reach 1.0?
As a matter of fact, we are now working towards this goal. There is basically a
single major piece missing for that: a good user manual. If you are a skilled manual
writer, have some spare time, and want to help, drop us a mail on
the scummvm-devel mailing list.

Several months have passed since we last updated our FAQ.
Lots of things have happened in the meanwhile and we have added a nice collection of
new answers to it. So what are you waiting for? Go and read the
FAQ now!

Well, we left it open a bit longer for those who ran late... but the entries for the ScummVM Revamp
contest are now closed. Judges will be looking at the pages over the last few days, and unless there is
an out-right winner the finalists will be voted on by YOU - our dearest users :)

Further information will be posted soon. The winner will receive some Random Stuff(tm), with the main
prize being some Sam and Max swag (most likely) signed by the creator of Sam and Max, Steve Purcell.
Further information will be posted soon!

Just a reminder that the submission deadline for the Website Revamp contest is here in
just ten days! The very first submission was just received, so if you have yet to even
start, time is running out.

The prizes will be announced as soon as somebody gets back to me since certain sites news posts
suggest he hasn't forgotten :)

Hello, humble Website Watchers. We have gathered you all here today for a contest of most epic
proportions.

Well, not really.

We're holding a contest to redesign the ScummVM website. If you have talent, and want to contribute
something to ScummVM, here is your chance.

Rules

Designs should be submitted in Photoshop (.PSD) or GIMP (.XCF)
format. Layers should be used, and consideration taken that the majority
of the design is feasibly done in HTML with minimal use of large
graphical elements.

The completed design must be designed for optimal use at 1024x768,
but the page should be designed to be renderable in lower resolutions and in text-only browsers.

The main focus should be on an easy, noticeable and uncrowded navigation system.

Sites submitted with a completed HTML template will be considered for extra points if they
obey the following extra rules. Otherwise they will be graded on design merits only.

Completed sites should be submitted as a one-page HTML template. All original graphics
should be included (layered if applicable) in Photoshop .PSD or GIMP .XCF format.

Sites must have readable HTML/CSS code, and should be
quick-loading and as 'light' as possible.

Sites should be W3C HTML4.01 verified, and have no particular browser dependencies.

Submissions close on the 21st of October, and public voting will occur after the team has selected
the final candidates. There will be a prize or two of some sort for the winner, which will be announced at
a later date. Please e-mail all submissions to contest@scummvm.org in a .zip, .tar.gz or .tar.bz2
archive.

Well, this is just to let you know we are not dead. There has been some amazing work happening in
the last few weeks - with ScummVMs support for the HE SCUMM games improving in rapid bursts thanks to
the combined talent of cyx, Kirben and Sev. And of course, there has been more development than just this.

And now we would like to bring up the point that our side-projects Residual and ScummEX
both need developers and contributors. We welcome patches from other programmers very much.
With the help of ScummVM developers joostp and aquadran, salty-horse (a regular #scummvm'er)
today submitted a patch for lipsync animations in Residual. Please see our 'subprojects' page and
the 'Coding Guidelines' in our Documentation section. If you are interested in persuing a particular
problem, please e-mail the "-devel" mailing list or pop on IRC if you need advice or help.

Well, one of those "Small Yet Important" coding mistakes has cropped up in ScummVM 0.6.1. A
copy-and-paste error in the 'Edit Game' screen may result in people not being able to save a game.

The mistake involves the new 'Paths' tab, which allows for easier editing of game paths.
Unfortunately, the 'Extra Path' field on this screen is accidentally saved as directory to
use for saved games, instead of correct field below it. This was noticed and fixed in the
experimental CVS version, but the fix was mistakenly left out of the ScummVM 0.6.1 release.

If you encounter this glitch, the recommended work around is to set the Extra Path to the
saved game directory. ScummVM 0.6.1b will be released soon to correct this issue.

ScummVM 0.6.1 is out, and can now be grabbed from our download page!
Among the usual changes, ScummVM should now run natively on 64-bit machines --
something we actually forgot to mention in the NEWS file.

And you know what they say: "To save the world, you have to push a few old ladies down the
stairs." So we made a mother-load of fixes in this release. Some of the wonderful things
you will no LONGER see in ScummVM include:

Glitches using an Ogg Vorbis talkie file in some games

Crashes on 64-bit machines

Crashes when saving to an invalid directory in Broken Sword 1

Lots of sound glitches in Curse of Monkey Island, Full Throttle and The Dig

Crashes in some international versions of Simon the Sorcerer

... and lots of other annoying bugs!

So don't delay, download today. Downloads are not yet available for all supported
ports, such as non-ARM PocketPCs and the HandheldPC binaries. These should become available
within the next week.

This is just a quick update to let everybody know we're still alive. Work on ScummVM is progressing as per usual, and we intend to release ScummVM 0.6.1
shortly.

ScummVM 0.6.1 will contain several bugfixes for various games, as well as several sound and music enhancements for later SCUMM games (Full Throttle, The Dig,
Curse of Monkey Island).

Also, followers of CVS may have noticed that support for Another World was recently added. This provoked quite a bit of argument within the ScummVM team as
to whether this is considered an adventure and within ScummVMs goals.

After much debate, the engine author (cyx) decided that it would be more convenient to continue the project seperate from ScummVM. It has now been removed,
and future information and development will occur as part of the RAW project. To prevent any doomsday
predictions, I should also point out that he remains a member of the ScummVM team.

After yesterdays ground-breaking announcement, we are sad to announce the immediate disbandment of the CABAL team.
Over the last several days there has been heated debate regarding several important design issues, and current
tension in the team has risen to an insurmountable level.

"It's really unfortunate", Max Horn, senior developer on ScummVM and Exult, was quoted as saying,
"but [former FreeSCI maintainer] Christoph [Reichenbach]'s ideas of aligning curly braces with the left-hand
side of function declarations while appending them to the end of the line for 'while' and 'for' loops did not make
any sense at all."
The latter replied by pointing out that "using anything but tabs for indentation is calling for trouble."

Claudio Matsuoka, of the Sarien project, pointed out his disappointment and noted that he didn't see much of a
point in trying to co-operate with people entirely incapable of reaching agreements on such trivial issues. "I
mean, we haven't even resolved the entire EMACS vs. vi dispute, and they're already at each other's throats
again."
James Brown, another senior developer on the ScummVM project, sadly announced that he was laughed out of the project
meer hours before a decision to split was made. "They just said I didn't belong, since I prefer nano as a
editor..." he admitted.

April 1st, THE INTERNET: The FreeSCI,
Sarien and
ScummVM teams
today announced the formation of CABAL (Coalesced 'Adventures beyond
Architecture' League), a universal adventure game interpreter. This
new project will unite the strengths and capabilities of the projects
involved, creating what the project members believe will be a
revolution for adventure game fans around the globe.

When asked about the relevance of CABAL for the worldwide adventure
gaming market, ScummVM project lead Max Horn commented that "[with]
the market for adventure titles waning, we believe that the formation
of a project with the explicit goal of running every adventure game
ever released will infuse it with new life." FreeSCI maintainer
Lars Skovlund added that "this will certainly cause an upheaval in
the gaming world. Adventure game fans around the world, rejoice!".

In addition to supporting LucasArts' SCUMM games (including famous
titles such as "Monkey Island", "Indiana Jones" and "Sam and Max"),
Sierra's SCI and AGI lines ("King's Quest", "Leisure Suit Larry",
"Space Quest"...), and other games already supported by the
retrospective engines, the newly united team plans to continue to add
further titles to their already impressive list.

Exult is being merged in as a plugin, allowing Ultima 7 fans
around the world to play their favorite game on the many platforms
already supported by the CABAL component engines - including
Palm/PocketPC PDAs and the Dreamcast.

Revolution software has offered the source-code for Broken Sword 3,
which will be added to the titles supported by the upcoming CABAL3D
project - alongside with Grim Fandango and, possibly, Ultima IX
(negotiations are ongoing).

Support for the SNES games Final Fantasy IV through VI (Japanese
numbering, i.e. FF2/FF3 according to US releases) is planned for
sometime this Fall. Whilst these are not strictly adventure games,
the storyline and plots in this series are more imaginative than any
'action adventure' title published in recent years.

Offers by various companies, including Microsoft and Amiga
International, to buy out the team have been gently but firmly
declined by the leads of the joint project. "We know that we could
earn a lot of money from this, but we are idealists and at this time
we have the goal to reform the worlds adventure market. Once that is
achieved, we can reconsider about making some money out of this."

In other news, ScummVM will be featured on TechTV's Call for Help show, on the 19th of March as Free File of the Day.

The ScummVM project is pleased to announce the immediate release of ScummVM
0.6.0. ScummVM is a graphic adventure game interpreter designed to allow users
to play many classic adventure game titles on various computer systems;
(Linux, Windows 2000/XP, *BSD, Mac OS X, PocketPC/Handheld PC, Palm,
Dreamcast and more)

Version 0.6.0 brings with it a new milestone in ScummVM history, with all
LucasArts/LucasFilm SCUMM adventure titles now being supported. We are also
proud to announce in conjunction with ScummVM 0.6.0 the release of the
classic adventure game 'Flight of the Amazon Queen' (originally available
for the Amiga and DOS) as freeware. The ScummVM team would like to thank
the authors Steve Stamatiadis and John Passfield for providing the team
with the source code to this classic game, and allowing us to release it.

So, what's new?

ScummVM 0.6.0 includes, as usual, many bugfixes in all supported game engines.
There have also been dramatic fixes and improvements in the area of sound and
music, as well as a greatly improved game management/options screen and two new
graphics modes (HQ2x and HQ3x). Most importantly, we have also added new
support for the following games:

The classic V1 versions of the original LucasArts SCUMM games
Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken and the LucasArts SCUMM game 'Full
Throttle'

Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2. Many thanks to Revolution for providing
us with the source-code to these games.

Support for Flight of the Amazon Queen. Thanks to Steve and John for
providing us with the source code to this game, and permitting its
release as freeware.

ScummVM 0.6.0, the two freeware games Flight of the Amazon Queen and Beneath a Steel Sky,
as well as converted cutscenes required for playing Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2 may
be downloaded from the Download Page

What? We promised more frequent news updates? You lie! Prove it!... News archives you
say? Pfffah. Um. We were hacked!

We are nearing the final release of ScummVM 0.6.0, and there are just a few last minute
bugs to fix. We're also waiting for a reply to an e-mail from twopeople whom have
recently gone on an international jaunt, under the guise of 'work'. We have
heard rumors they have been seen in San Francisco running around naked screaming "I'm
working, I'm working". If spotted, approach with extreme caution, as they may be holidaying
and dangerous.

On a related, but more serious note, since the above pair are reasonably incommunicardo,
we may be releasing ScummVM 0.6.0 without the previously promised freeware game, which will
instead be released at a later stage.

We will leave you now with the promised blatently stolen quote. There is no subliminal
message enclosed. Honest.

Anyway, to answer your question, to get into the games industry, break into the Sony
party at E3, walk around saying "Online multiplayer is the
future," and if nobody has hired you
by 11:00 pm, sleep with the first person you hear speaking either Japanese or French.
Worked for me!

Finally, Ender, your humble (yet lazy) news poster and co-project leader would like to
let any Sony employees who happen to read this site know that he believes Online multiplayer
is the future. We're not even going to touch the Sam and Max 2 thing. (Boo! Hiss!)

Stay tuned for more zany and space-filling content-less news posts in the future!

We have recently branched ScummVM 0.6.0, and are now entering the final testing phase.
As such, we would be most happy if people could test the latest daily builds (or CVS build
from tag 'branch-0-6-0' and report their results.

We have already conducted preliminary testing of several games, but the following still
have not been tested and should take priority:

V1 Maniac Mansion

V2 Maniac Mansion

V1 Zak McKracken

V2 Zak McKracken

EGA Indiana Jones 3

VGA Indiana Jones 3

EGA Monkey Island 1

Monkey Island 2

The Dig

Curse of Monkey Island (Monkey 3)

Please report bugs in our bug tracker and successful completions of games on our General Forum. Thanks in advance for helping to
shape up the next release of ScummVM!

Just a quick news post to let everybody know that ScummVM 0.6.0 is still in-progress.
Unfortunatly, recent downtime and other issues with SourceForge.net have delayed the
branching and final testing of this release, but we're still hoping to get it out as soon
as we can!

On another note, continuing the current rash of computer problems, all scummvm.org e-mail
addresses are currently broken. We hope to fix this within the next few days, and no
messages should be lost. If however you want to discuss something important with us, we
really suggest talking to us in real-time on our IRC channel (#scummvm, on
irc.freenode.net).

Some people appear to think that yesterdays news post implies that Broken Sword 1 and 2
will be released as freeware. We would just like to clarify that this is not currently the
case. We will be releasing cutscene packs for use with the ORIGINAL game data in ScummVM,
and hopefully freewaring a completely different non-Revolution game.

So, what has been going on in the world of ScummVM lately?
Currently we are gearing up for our 0.6.0 release - this release will mark a major
milestone in ScummVM history. As of ScummVM 0.6.0, ScummVM should finally support
(at least the PC versions) of all LucasArts SCUMM adventures!

However, we need some help. As part of our next release we are also adding support for the
Revolution games Broken Sword 1 and 2 which will require specially reencoded versions of
the in-game cutscenes, as well as releasing another classic adventure game as
freeware.
However, we are not yet sure whether SourceForge will be able or willing to host these
files. So if anybody reading this news article happens to run, for example, a large
bandwidth-plenty archive (http or ftp) that preferably doesn't require annoying
registration methods (ala Fileplanet) and is willing to help... then please e-mail Ender (@
scummvm.org) and offer your assistance.

Everybody here at ScummVM Central, well, everybody still conscious, hopes that everybody is
having (or has had) a good Christmas!

As a vague attempt to start our new years resolution (of posting news more frequently) a
bit early, here is a mostly pointless news post. First, a request. If anybody notices any
article in the media about ScummVM (or indeed is from the media), please e-mail press [at]
scummvm.org so we can add it to our press page.

The release schedule for 0.6.0 has been pushed back a little due to
various problems (such as reencoding Broken Sword cutscenes) and heavy development on
certain features (like Full Throttles INSANE subsystem).

In an effort to reduce the length of our pre-release testing phase, I would ask that
anybody here who does use a daily or CVS build please report any bugs they find in
every-day use. This includes (despite what we usually say) our 'new' games: Full
Throttle, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Broken Sword 1 and 2.

As we are calling for testers before we 'freeze' development for a new release,
please ensure you test with the latest available CVS before reporting any bugs.

Whilst we know that the end of the year is approaching, it saddens us to announce that
the ScummVM project is closing due to personal reasons on behalf of most of the developers.
Visitors to our forum, such as timofonic, have suspected this may be the case for some time
and unfortunately I have been urged by einheitlix to tell the truth.

It's been a great ride, and we had some really wonderful things in store for you, such as a
new game we were planning to freeware for our next release, and the announcement that the
oft-requested completion of support for Full Throttle was underway - although it would
probably be in 0.7.0 not 0.6.0... but it's moot now.

I was planning on holding back this news until after the festivities, but as it's just a
hoax to see how many people actually read our news page and pay attention, I've decided to
announce it now.

In summary, in case people just skimmed that last paragraph: we are NOT really dead.
We're very much alive and kicking, and will be bringing you lots-o-cool-stuff early next
year!

Welcome to yet another quasi-regular reminder that, yes, your favorite project is far from
dead. So what's going on in the world of ScummVM?

ScummVM 0.6.0, although not due out for a few months at least, is going to knock your socks
off. Or at least, make them a nice shade of purple. Among the usual massive structural
changes, bugfixes galore, and maybe even a new platform or two... we have recently
(almost) finished support for the original V1 versions of Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken.
This leaves the ever difficult Full Throttle as the only LucasArts game we do not support
in it's mainstream form.

Also, thanks once more to the gracious support of Revolution, the next version of ScummVM
will include support for yet another of their wonderful innovative games - Broken Sword 2!

These are both already present, in some form, in our developmental CVS and daily builds -
however please remember they are experimental and still being heavily worked on. Please do
NOT file bugs or pester anyone regarding them. And maybe, just maybe, we might have some
more surprises in store before the next major release makes it to a SourceForge mirror near
you!

Some issues when running ScummVM fullscreen under MacOS X have been resolved

MorphOS port has undergone several critical bugfixes

Dreamcast port now supports Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2

We recommend all users upgrade to this release. Please note that whilst BASS
saves from 0.5.0 are compatible with this release, we recommend restarting your
game using the 0.5.1 save system if you continue to experience problems.

Although ScummVM 0.5.0 is our most tested version yet, a few problems always slip through
the cracks. Among some other minor issues, it has come to our attention that Beneath a
Steel Sky may occasionally produce unusable save games. Although this is a timing issue,
and very rare on most systems, a small group of people may discover this happening fairly
often.

A ScummVM 0.5.1 point release is planned in the near-future to fix this, and several other
smaller issues which have came to our attention. Also, the manual for Beneath a Steel sky
and possibly a scan of the included comic will be available for download later in the
week.

Thanks for everybody's support, and assistance in making our project even better!

Version 0.5.0 of ScummVM, the classic adventure game interpreter, has just been
released. This is our most tested version yet, thanks to everybody who answered
our call for testing. Thanks!

So what's new? Well, besides the usual bugfixes and improvements are:

Extensive overhaul of the music subsystem, more games now support music

Support for the Enhanced (V2) versions of Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken

Support for Beneath a Steel Sky, made possible thanks to Revolution Software supplying us with the original assembly source code!

Aspect Ratio correction added, by popular request

A link to the release notes and a more detailed list of changes can be found over on
the downloads page, along with
the downloads... and our special (worst kept secret :) surprise!

As an extra SPECIAL bonus, the really really wonderful people at Revolution Software Ltd. have decided to allow us to make Beneath a Steel Sky *freeware!*
You can download either the CD version (70M, includes speech) or the smaller
Floppy version (8M), along with ScummVM 0.5.0, from the downloads page.

Enjoy! Oh, and there is that little donate button down there on the left. We
need to buy our Dreamcast porter a copy of Simon the Sorcerer :)

ScummVM has just entered a CVS freeze and testing, to prepare for
an eventual 0.5.0 stable release (hopefully at the end of July). But we
need YOUR help!

Please click that little 'Documentation' option over there, and look at
the 0.5.0 release checklist.
If there is a game that is listed as needing testing, and you happen to feel
like playing it through with the latest development version of ScummVM, please
do so and let us know the results. Further information is on the checklist page.

Besides many fixes that will be in the upcoming 0.5.0, especially in the
area of music, comes support for three new games:

Enhanced Maniac Mansion

Enhanced Zak McKracken

Beneath a Steel Sky, thanks to the support of Revolution

In other news, Anonymous CVS is (and has been for some time) lagging
behind the official development tree. If you want the bleeding-edge CVS
(for testing, as an example), please use the 'Source Snapshot' on the
Download page over Anonymous CVS. And of course,Be Vigilant

ScummVM 0.4.1, a stability-focused point release, is now available for download. Changes since 0.4.0 include:

Several crashes/bugs have been fixed in Curse of Monkey Island.

Several iMUSE and music-related bugs have been fixed.

AdvMame3X is new, giving a 3x scaled and AdvMame-smoothed game.

Fixed airport doors in Zak McKracken

Fixed crash in SDL backend

The source code, as well as binaries for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and PalmOS are already available at our download page. As always, other binaries (for PocketPC, MorphOS, Dreamcast and others) will follow shortly.

Five months after our last release, 0.3.0b, and over 2500 CVS commits/adds later, the ScummVM team proudly presents ScummVM 0.4.0.

The following is an overview of what's new in 0.4.0:

Curse of Monkey Island (comi) support (experimental)

Added support for the EGA versions of Loom, Monkey Island and Indy3

Improved music support in Indy3 and the floppy versions of Monkey Island

Many Simon the Sorcerer 1 & 2 improvements and fixes

Very pre-alpha Beneath a Steel Sky code. Don't expect it to do anything (in fact it is disabled in the 0.4.0 release, but you can get it by compiling ScummVM yourself).

Even more pre-alpha support for enhanced versions of V2 SCUMM games (Maniac Mansion and Zak)

Preliminary support for early Humongous Entertainment titles (very experimental)

New debug console and several GUI/Launcher enhancements

New Save/Load code (easier to expand while retaining compatibility)

Dreamcast port now works with new games added for 0.3.0b

New official PalmOS port

Various minor and not so minor SCUMM game fixes

Large memory leak fixed for The Dig/COMI

SMUSH code optimised, frame dropping added for slower machines

Code cleanups

The source code, as well as binaries for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, PocketPC, Solaris and PalmOS are already available at our download page. Other binaries for MorphOS, Dreamcast and others, will follow shortly.

We've received a number of e-mails lately asking if any work is happening on ScummVM. We would like to
reassure people that do -not- follow CVS that yes, a lot of work is happening.

We are currently gearing up for the release of 0.4.0, which should be happening within a few weeks.
I'd like to ask people who feel like living dangerously to try out CVS and Daily Builds, and let us
know of any problems we should be aware of. In the 'Documentation' section on the left, you will see a
'ScummVM 0.4.0 Checklist'. Games that have been tested without any problems are marked there - please
test the games that are not marked tested and let us know your results on the Forum (Update: That's
the General forum). Remember to include the date you downloaded the build you completed the game
with.

At the moment we are focusing on earlier EGA games (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, LoomEGA, Indy3EGA),
although Beneath a Steel Sky support is progressing at a slow but steady pace. Somebody also recently
donated a Playstation 2 modchip to the team, so expect a native PS2 port as soon as Ender has it
installed (ScummVM already runs fine under Playstation2 Linux).

A reminder to those that are interested in our latest progress, you can always sign up to the cvs-logs
mailing list. Click the 'Project Home' link on the left, and browse to the 'Lists' page. This list will
receive an e-mail every time there is a new change to the source-code, so be warned it can be rather
technical and high-traffic. As an alternative you can just play with CVS Checkouts or Daily Builds and
discover anything new yourself :)

Last Friday, March 14th, our fellow ScummVM developer and friend,
Felix Jakschitsch (known to many under his nickname yot),
committed suicide at the young age of 19.

We are completely shocked by this, and do not know or understand what drove him into this.
It is a sorrowful world in which a cheerful, intelligent and helpful man is put in a situation
in which he sees no other way to escape than taking his own life.
We are sad to lose our valued friend. He contributed important work
to ScummVM, including much of the Zak256 support. His loss is felt deeply by all
of us, and we extend our condolence to his family and close friends, whose grief we share.

If you want to leave a message to his friends and family, there is a guestbook available.
Also here is a news paper article telling more details (use babelfish if you don't speak german).

Work has been slow lately, but recently with the addition of Super Dooper Secret
Project Number Six, development has started to pick back up with a lot of code cleanup and some fairly
important bugfixes. Expect a new release eventually.

In other news, there has been a surge in interest of a Playstation 2 port again. I (Ender) am quite
willing to do one if people donate at least US$75 (see that little button under the menu) to purchase
a modchip. It shouldn't take long, and one of you - our loyal users - has already volunteered to
install it for me if I do manage to obtain one. If we find there is enough interest (which will
obviously depend on the donation status :), we will start an official port ASAP.

Over at the Linux Game Tome (http://happypenguin.org), ScummVM has been voted Best Emulator. Thanks to anybody who voted for us.

In other news, Curse of Monkey Island support is stabilizing. While there are still a number of small graphical glitches, currently
we are down to two known gameplay-critical bugs and a number of other 'inconveniences' and
cases of incorrect behavior. We hope to be able to announce Curse of Monkey Island completable very soon.

A lot of people have been asking where we are going from here. Here is a brief (very subject to change!) guide to our next few
targets:

As usual, this is but a rough guideline depending on both progress and free time for our developers. If you want to help, and know
how to use CVS and a compiler... either fix bugs, or regression test! We are very much looking for people to test CVS with games
other than ComI and look for critical bugs that were not present in 0.3.0b, then attempt to try different versions of CVS and locate
at least the day when the bug started occurring. This allows us to more easily determine what changes have caused problems, without
spending weeks blindly guessing.

Needless to say, if you find a critical bug that IS also present in 0.3.0b, check for a bug report. If one isn't present, please
submit one!

If you're a Linux user, Happy Penguin are running a
series of polls
to determine the best games in a ton of categories. Go vote for your favourite
emulators, what you think the most promising project is, et cetera... Hopefully some
of those votes might even be for us :)

I (Ender) am interested in finding out if any ScummVM users will be present at Linux.conf.au '03 here in Perth... if you'll be there,
drop a post in the forum. If there are a few people going we might get together for Pizza or something afterwards, or maybe chuck
together a last minute spontaneous Classic Gaming BOF (if somebody else wants to organise it, I'm a terrible person for that kind of
stuff :)

First, a quick note that the problems with the Clie Source forum have been resolved, and the Clie/Palm port will be merged into CVS
as soon as chrilith has updated his port to work with 0.3.0's OSystem architecture.

A quick update on CMI (COMI/Monkey3) support. Within just several weeks, remarkable progress has been made on support for this game, but work will
likely be slowed for the next week as various developers are otherwise occupied. Currently, except for some bugs that make the Cannon
scene rather difficult and unstable, it is possible to play some way into Part II of the game.

The current main issues remaining include a bug with flObject allocation (causes a crash in some dialog sequences), some script
termination issues (causes various game-crippling crashes in the cannon scene and several Part II puzzles) and the various problems
with the opening cannon puzzle.

As usual, please remember this work is still experimental, and please do not file any bug reports regarding it. Patches, however, are
very welcome! :)

.. to everybody except Casa Addams, many users on the Clie Source forums (whom obviously have brains as big as their PDAs,) and that
other idiot who is bundling ScummVM with warez LucasArts games on UseNet. This is somewhat of an open plea, although we do not really
expect morons who have done something so idiotic to listen.

Sorry for this open message being so harsh guys, but do you not realise that by associating and bundling ScummVM with pirated
copies ("Abandonware" or otherwise) of LucasArts games, you're basically giving them even more excuse to take legal action
against us (and bring possible financial ruin on the developers of this program :)... I'm especially disappointed in chrilith who has
almost certainly guaranteed that, unless we feel very forgiving, there will never be an official Palm port of ScummVM integrated into
CVS.

If you appreciate what we are doing, and have done, then do not abuse it. Otherwise you are damaging the reputation, and possible
legal status of both ScummVM and its developers. I've seen some VERY ridiculous comments on the Clie Source forums to the effect
that LucasArts do not sell these games anymore. With the exception of some versions (specifically Zak256 and LoomCD), this is stupid.
Most LucasArts games can be ordered in collection packs from Amazon or the LucasArts store (if you live in America.). Heck, I saw a
bunch of LucasArts classic adventures in Electronic Boutique when I was Christmas Shopping.
In other news, Curse of Monkey Island support is progressing nicely! Be sure to try out the latest Daily Builds if you like living on
the wild side (but of course do not file bug reports on CMI support).

First we would like to mention that LucasArts has put out a pack, at least in the UK, featuring updated versions of Sam and Max and
Full Throttle, designed to work with Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2K/XP. This pack (entitled, imaginatively, "The Entertainment Pack") also
comes with The Dig and Grim Fandango... these versions have not been updated, and are the original Windows versions (yes, these
games DID come with native Windows ports in some of the earlier LucasArts Adventure Packs).

The updated Sam and Max and Full Throttle engines were not ported in-house by LucasArts, likely because of a lack of time AND
because most people who worked on SPUTM/SCUMM have left anyway, but by Aaron Giles - the original Mac Porter (and renown MAME
developer :). There are no modifications except for a DirectX wrapper around the graphics code and a really really bad graphics
scaler.

Our take? Call us biased, but unless you need perfect compatibility, want to play Full Throttle now, or are missing more
than two of these games - it will probably be far cheaper to buy these games second-hand or individually. The included updated
binaries are inferior feature-wise to ScummVM, as you miss out on our enhanced features, such as support for platforms -other- than
Windows (such as Macintosh, Unix and PocketPC), our graphics scalers, etc. Of course, if you do purchase the pack, the game
datafiles are unchanged and of course compatible with ScummVM anyway. It is nice to see LucasArts releasing something like
this, and doing something positive to try and revive their classic games - or at least drum up marketing hype for the sequel :)

Final conclusion, buy it if you want it or are a collector - but it's not worth the money simply for Windows compatibility.
However if you do purchase it, you ARE encouraging LucasArts to update more classics in the future - although hopefully ScummVM will
make such a need obsolete shortly. We suggest LucasArts spend it's development costs on re-releasing it's lost and RARE classics,
like the FmTowns 256 color version of Zak Mckracken. For those interested, the updated versions were compiled on October 2nd for Full
Throttle, and October 24th for Sam and Max.

In development news, several ScummVM developers have actually been really boring people and coded this Christmas, coming up
over just a few days with the basics for Curse of Monkey Island support. I'm sure our Macintosh users will be happy to hear they
will, in maybe as little as a month, finally be able to play this game. Support is in the latest CVS and Daily Builds, but do NOT
file bug reports as we know it doesn't really work or do anything at the moment. Full support will be available "When It's
Done".. or the day after Duke Nukem Forever comes out. Whichever is first.

I forgot to mention this when we released 0.3.0b, but ScummVM has recently been spotted in a UK magazine: PC Zone mentioned ScummVM in a review of the iPAQ 3870. A page scan is available. In addition, the german computer magazine c't had an article about games for PDAs which also listed Pocket Scumm (sorry, no picture available right now).

Monkey in your pocket? Definitely.

If anybody else notices ScummVM in the media, we would appreciate it you dropped us a line at press_stuff@scummvmNOSPAM.org. Remove the NOSPAM from the address, obviously. If possible, please also send us a scan of the page.

If you work for a magazine that wants to mention ScummVM, maybe in an article on retro-gaming (*hint hint*), then also feel free to drop us a line. We can probably arrange an interview, screenshots, help... and/or large bribe-like quantities of bananas.

No!, it's ScummVM 0.3.0b, our first official release since LucasArts decided to go after us!

Small update, we've also added a few links to our Links page that you might want to check out. Expecially VOGONS, please
stop asking us if we're going to do things like add support for Beneath a Steel Sky :)

That's right, since the many many months since LucasArts first issued us with a DMCA notice (and wisely decided after the subsequent
slashdotting and fan backlash from you, our users, to negotiate a deal :), we have been waiting for a settlement with LucasArts
before releasing a long awaited new version. The wait is over. No, we haven't reached a settlement, we just got tired of waiting to
release this gem.

There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of bugfixes since our last 0.2.0 release... not to mention support for at least three new
games (The VGA version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and support for The Dig and Simon the Sorcerer 2)... and new features
such as a vastly improved in-game gui and a built-in launcher to make it even easier for you to add, configure, and run your classic
LucasArts (and AdventureSoft) games. Experimental support for Full Throttle is here, as well as many bugfixes for the games
introduced in our last version... such as the FmTowns 256 color version of Zak McKracken, and the VGA floppy version of Monkey
Island.

Hopefully we will be able to come at you with new releases more often from now on, hopefully at least monthly. Please enjoy this
release as much as we've became frustrated making it, and remember - if you give all your money to LucreArts, maybe they'll let us
live instead of abandoning us on... on.... Monkey Island! (Ugh, Bananas... I hate Bananas).

For those interested in the boring news, here's both a summary and an update on our legal situation, for those users who are just
now discovering ScummVM.
We've been at a deadlock with LucasArts for some time now. LucasArts simply do not like our current license, the GPL (General
Public License). While we do not think it necessary, we have agreed to change the license to something more LucasArts-'friendly'.
However, LucasArts wish us to include distribution terms which are against section one of both the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) and the Open Source Definition. We cannot agree to this, nor the condition they
wish to require (no commercial distribution)... because it conflicts with the DFSG and OSD, which we require, and it is something we
legally cannot be sure of enforcing - several Linux and BSD distributions already include ScummVM packages, and we cannot be certain
they will notice a license change. Oh, and we WANT distributions to be able to include our software :)

To date, LucasArts has not been able to give us any firm complaints regarding ScummVM, besides some vague claims that if they didn't
enforce these conditions on us, it would effectively give up their rights to their own Intellectual Property. We do not believe this,
there certainly have not been any documented cases of the GPL leading to such a challenge in the past, and far more important
properties have been licensed under the GPL in the past, such as the Quake titles from id
software. LucasArts isn't releasing any of their own code under the GPL, and we really do not believe that they should require us
to change our license - all we want them to do is leave us alone to create our emulator. Sanction us, if it makes them feel safer
legally. But if they are going to require such a major step on our part of changing our license, they at least have to capitulate on
the point of OSD/DFSG compliance.

We here at the ScummVM team would like to thank the people at LucasArts who are supporting us, and attempting to help us come to an
arrangement. But guys, we're your fans. All we are doing is updating the engine for games, in a form of an emulator... because you
haven't - although we've asked you to for years. We've even made more money for you, as quite a number of us have went out and
BOUGHT your classic bundle packs, just to play it with ScummVM.

These last few paragraphs have been brought to you by the "Please don't sue us for making a new release"
department.

Well, we seem to have lost contact with LucasArts, as we haven't heard
from them for several weeks now. So, assuming they don't suddenly e-mail
us and veto it, we are preparing for a 0.3.0 release.

Firstly, ScummVM 0.3.0 will include support for:

Zak McKracken (FmTowns 256 Color Version)

Monkey Island (VGA Floppy and Enhanced CD)

Monkey Island II

Loom (CD Talkie version)

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Day of the Tentacle

Sam and Max Hit the Road

The Dig

Simon The Sorcerer 1

The next major release, 0.4.0, will include support for:

Simon The Sorcerer 2

Full Throttle

Indiana Jones and Last Crusade (256 color version)

So, what can you do to help? Well, we currently require people to test
all of the supported games and let us know if there are any major bugs
that mark them as uncompletable. For details on how to do this, please
see ScummVM 0.3.0 Release
Info.

A message was recently posted to the scummvm development list detailing the current status of ScummVM,
including things such as details on where we are heading for our next release, and an update on the legal
situation.

The legal situation is still pending, as we are waiting on a response from LucasArts to our last e-mail.

Progress-wise, people following the daily build will have noticed the new in-game GUI we have implemented. It's still very much a work
in progress, so expect odd things to happen.
Some of our wonderful developers are currently working on improving compatibility with The Dig and Full Throttle, as it seems we might
even get one of these completable by the time the legal situation is resolved and we can get our next release out.

Meanwhile, the CVS tree and daily builds are somewhat in an experimental form.

On to other matters, we are seeking mercenaries to kidnap two people so we can torture them into revealing the two current 'problem
areas' in ScummVM.

We need the person who primarily extended iMUSE for Sam and Max Hit The Road. Pretty much every remaining bug with ScummVMs support of
that game is related to the iMUSE system, so if anybody can 'acquire' a person or any information on this subsystem, please contact
Ender to arrange discrete delivery of the... package.
Secondly, we require Vince Lee for questioning over the
INSANE cutscene engine used in games such as Full Throttle. Our lack of information on this system has left us at a dead-end as far as
progress in this game goes. If you can acquire this person, or any information regarding INSANE, you will be well rewarded. Anonymity
will be honored, if the 'acquiree' desires it.
As an alternative, we can negotiate a deal if someone wishes to raid LucasArts HQ and persuade it's occupants to part with source or
information regarding this two items. Our own attempts as infiltration of this facility have failed, due to some mysterious person
called "Management".

Seriously, if anybody does have any information on these two headaches for us, please get in touch with Ender. If you've previously worked at LucasArts and wish to help anonymously, we'll respect
that. I wouldn't be too afraid about giving assistance, as our own negotiations have revealed they are quite willing to let us exist,
they are just not willing ('at the moment') to share any actual information or source.

Thanks for playing, and remember - "never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game"!

At 16:57 (GMT), on September 17th... I - ScummVM - will officially be a year old!
Unfortunatly, nobody told me when my birthday was, they told me I was an orphan! But I'm going to
try and throw a party anyway. So everyone is invited to attend my IRC channel, #scummvm, on irc.freenode.net!

If your someone like famous, or you like me, or whatever, and you want to pop in and say 'Hi!' to me and my parents... come on by! Or if you just want to send me a birthday card, or
RSVP for the party, go over to the Contact page and e-mail Endy or someone. Or post in my new shiny Birthday Forum. We should be around pretty much all day.

If you want to actually meet a ScummVM developer in real life, and buy him (I don't have a mummy! Wahh!) a beer or something....
you can always drop a post in the Birthday Forum and see
if theres anyone else in your area. I'm sure they would appretiate it!

Oh, and I lost a small, fleece sweater with three blue roses on it. If you see it, please commit it to CVS for me!

Firstly, an update on our legal negotiations with LucasArts. We are hopefully very close to finalising our arrangement,
and sometime in the next week hope to make an announcement regarding this. Of course, we had hoped to make an
announcement a good month ago. Unfortunatly things are rather busy at LucasArts, so it has taken a while to talk to the
relevant people.

On another note, I would like to address something that comes up at least once a week. No, ScummVM is not currently in
any kind of position to start supporting OTHER non-SCUMM games. The inclusion of Simon support aside, the current team
has far too much on their hands trying to complete support for existing LucasArts classic adventures. Although we may
add support for other games in the future, we do not currently plan on it... and any requests to do so will be promply
ignored.

Unless it is accompanied by a donation of money over $2,000.

Meanwhile, we would suggest asking for help at the wonderful VOGONS (Very Old
Games on New Systems) site if you require help with other games on modern operating systems.

Anyway, thats all for the moment. Donations have been rather nonexistant lately, so if you havn't already,
please consider using the PayPal button under the menu on the left... and send us some cash. Currently we are
using donations for legal costs, and purchasing software (such as a copy or three of IDA Pro, as well as games some of our developers may not already have).

Good afternoon people. I know it's been a long time since you have heard
from me, and you may be wondering why I called you hear today.

I have heard rumors the project is dead, and I would like to assure
everyone that's not so. We have been working very hard lately, and many
bugfixes have been made to various games. In fact, we are almost ready
for another release.... but we are waiting for a resolution to our Legal
Drama before that happens.

So, what is happening on the legal front? Well, our erstwhile project
leader (James 'Ender' Brown) has had many phone conferences with
LucasArts, and we should shortly be announcing an agreement that will
make both parties happy. I would like to thank LEC for being open to
helping keep the project alive, instead of just forcing us to shut down.

Hopefully within the next week, news of our future will be announced.
Until then, keep donating, and keep telling everyone how much you love
ScummVM. Remember, it's not people saying 'LucasArts SUX' that
will convince them to keep helping the project... it's people
saying 'ScummVM Rules' that will!

Well people, we are still alive so far. We are currently talking to LucasArts
to see if we can negotiate a deal. To be honest, while we hope it is possible,
we are dubious that the deal LucasArts may provide can give us certain
freedoms we need to develop. One of the biggest fears of most companies is
the GPL (General Public License). Some companies feel this gives users far too
much latitude in use of their software. Unfortunately, if LEC feels the same way,
we may have to reject their offer. It is close on impossible to relicense GPLed
software, as it would mean getting permission from anyone who ever wrote even
one line of code included in ScummVM.

So far most of our communication has been off-the-record and fairly vague,
but be assured we haven't vanished, and we'll give you the latest news as it
happens!

Also, thanks to people donating. We are currently at a little over $100, which
is tagged to be spent on both buying versions of games for testing, and also
saving up to our target of $300 to purchase a copy of IDA Pro, arguably the
best disassembler on earth. Keep donating :)

Update: The text of the letter, and the teams response, can be found in the scummvm-devel list archives
Today was a milestone for the ScummVM project, as we finally received the
long-awaited for e-mail from LucasArts Legal regarding the project.

Thankfully, they do not yet appear to have a valid complaint. Their message
requesting the removal of the site is based on the presumption that we are distributing
LucasArts own engine on this site. Of course, ScummVM is a fully original work
based equally on reverse engineering and original decoding work by many
different people in the community, so this request doesn't really affect us.

We're safe for the moment, and will continue to work on bringing the
wonderful classics of the LucasArts company to your computing devices for,
hopefully, a long time to come!

Not much to report really, but don't worry, we are far from dead. Most of the
ScummVM team is very busy with real-life school and work at the moment, but
we are hoping the worst will be over very soon and we can get down to
crunching some more bugs and releasing a new version!
Here is a very rough draft of what we are considering to be ScummVM milestones:

0.2.5: All supported games next to bugless

0.3.0: The Dig and MI1 VGA Floppy supported

0.4.0: Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade supported, more bugfixes

0.5.0: Full Throttle supported, basic CMI and Maniac Mansion support

0.6.0: More work on CMI, MM and further bugfixes

0.7.0: Maniac Mansion completable, Zak McCracken and Loom16 playable

0.8.0: Zak McCracken and Loom16 completable

0.9.0: Bugfixes and CMI completable

1.0.0: The end of the beginning

Obviously this is a very rough outline, and is subject to change if we
suddenly make a break-through in a game. But this is just to give people a
basic idea of where we are going. CMI support will be the hardest, as it is
quite drastically different compared to the versions of SCUMM we have been
dealing with to this point.
Happy adventuring!

The Windows daily builds don't contain any virus's, some anti-virus scanner like AntiVir are falsely reporting the recent xbox emulator trojan (TR/XBoxEmu.2) in all self extracting files created by SFX Maker

Work on ScummVM has been proceeding very slowly of late, as the main
devteam is quite busy on other matters.

We are aware of quite a few issues in Zak256 and some very serious
ones in Simon that were found for 0.2.0, and plan to do an interim
release (0.2.1) as soon as they are fixed. We are of course looking
for more developers willing to help out, as there is only currently
one person working on the game interpreter itself (although several
are working on more specialized parts of the engine).

We are also aware of a GP32 port in progress, and urge anyone who
knows the developer to get him to contact Ender.
Besides the fact we are quite interested in his work, and wish to invite him to
join the team... we are quite peeved he has released binaries and there appears
to be no way to contact him for the source code to his port (as is required by
the GPL license ScummVM uses)!

Until the next update... I can't pick that up! No really! Read my lips..
I... Can't... Pick... That... Up!

After much waiting, ScummVM 0.2.0 has been released! So head over
to the downloads page and grab it for your favorite platform.

Currently we have downloads for i386 Debian Woody, Windows, Dreamcast,
MacOSX, Familiar/Intimate, and Windows CE. Over the next few days we will also be adding
downloads for MorphOS, RPMs, and maybe a BeOS download.

Besides many major fixes, ScummVM now supports several new games,
such as the FmTowns 256 color version of Zak McKracken, the CD version
of Loom, and (strangely enough) Simon the Sorcerer! Several games
supported in 0.1.0 are now completable in 0.2.0, such as Sam and Max.

ScummVM release 0.2.0 also includes several new platforms,
better support for different CPU architectures and endians, many
more commandline options and experimental (e.g., do not report bugs on
it!) support for Full Throttle, The Dig, the VGA version of
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the VGA version of Monkey Island
(floppy).!

So don't delay. Download it now, and if you really like it, click
that little paypal button under the menu to donate money to help the
ScummVM team buy tools and software to continue this project.

The ScummVM team is still working hard on fixing all the remaining
bugs so we can release our next milestone (0.2.0). In the meantime,
here is some news regarding the project.

Of particular interest may be the fact that Zak McKracken 256 (the
enhanced graphics fmTowns version) will be officially supported in
0.2.0, and can currently be completed with only two major bugs in
the current CVS.

Also, we currently have someone working on a GBA port. This has been
a popular request, and hopefully will be ready in time for 0.3.0. You
can see proof of it's existence in this development screenshot.
The port is currently too early to be placed in CVS, so just hang tight :)

In other port news, LyonHrt has compiled an old CVS build of
ScummVM for the Dreamcast, maintained by our team member
Marcus Comstedt. They can be found listed below. Please note
that as these are old builds they are not officially supported by
the ScummVM team. Comments on this port should be posted on the
ConsoleVision Dreamcast forum

Yes, we are still alive. Unfortunatly far from being ready for 0.2.0,
several people have raised a large number of critical bugs we are
working through. Stick with us, we'll get their eventually!

Oh, and by the way.. if anyone knows the location of Sean Clark or
any other person who scripted Sam and Max, please kidnap them and
force them to explain an annoying script race in the Mystery Vortex
which has kept several of us awake for the last 48 hours.

The 0.2.0 release has been put off for a while as the ScummVM engine
is again undergoing some reorganisation. However, as an intresting bit
of trivia, the 0.2.0 release will also include support for a non-SCUMM
game! Simon The Sorcerer. So share and enjoy the latest CVS folks.

Also some of you may have noticed a PayPal button at the bottom of the
navigation bar. If you've enjoyed ScummVM please donate some money
to help us buy software to help development. Thanks!

Thanks to several people, we have confirmed that DOTT, Sam and Max
and LoomCD are all completable with no 'major' bugs in the current
code. On the other hand, several serious bugs with MI2 and Indy4 have
been found, so the 0.2.0 release may take slightly longer than expected.

To the coders out there, feel free to browse the bug list and take a shot
at commiting fixes for them. At the moment there is only one person
regually working on ScummVM, so things are slow.

After some work, the 256 color CD Talkie version of Loom is completable!
With this done, we are starting to gear up for a 0.2.0 release. To help
us with this, we ask you - our game players - to take the latest Daily
Builds and CVS snapshots and play through your favorite games!
We need to make sure that the following games are completable with no
major playability bugs (eg, crashes, freezes, etc - minor issues such
as sound syncro do not count):

Loom CD

Monkey Island 1 (CD)

Monkey Island 2

Indy 4: Fate of atlantis

Sam and Max

Day of the Tentacle

Thanks a lot, and we hope everything will work just fine so we can
finally get a new release out the door! Also, by popular demand,
0.2.0 will include a new 'auto-save' feature to ensure you'll never
lose hours of hard work because you forgot to save and suddenly
found a bug!

After a few weeks, the ScummVM code has officially been de-frozen and
work on game support is proceeding. As a taster, several bugs with Zak256
have been fixed, and the game is now much more playable... although we're still a fair way off!

ScummVM is currently in a code freeze. This means the CVS will not be updated with any new bugfixes, as we are doing a major reorganisation of the engine.
We hope that by rewriting many portions of ScummVM into proper C++, we can fix a large number of bugs inherant in the engine, as well as make the code easier to work with, for ourselves and developers wishing to join the project in the future.
Note this means bug reports and patches currently in the system will not be looked at until after the freeze ends. We plan to freeze for a week, although it may take longer.

Travis Howell is making daily snapshots of ScummVM for Windows
available for download. Kudos go out to Travis. Also, there is
a link for a Windows SDL version of ScummVM. This version does
not require the Cygwin dll.
We have also placed a Compatibility Page online to help answer
the most common question, "Which games work?". We will keep this
page updated as development continues.

The ScummVM team is busy scratching away getting more of your
favorite classic LucasArts games to work. Take a gander at this
little screenshot to wet your appetite. More screenshots and info
will flow this way as it happens.

Welcome to the ScummVM! ScummVM is a SCUMM (Script Creation Utility For Maniac Mansion)
interpreter for Linux and windows.

LucasArts, Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, Full Throttle, The Dig, LOOM, and probably lots of other things are registered trademarks of LucasArts, Inc.. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are owned by their respective companies. ScummVM is not affiliated in any way with LucasArts, Inc.